If you were intrigued enough by the title to open this blog, you’re probably thinking, “what?” Most people don’t hold flies in a very high regard. But according to researchers at Iowa State University, a study conducted on cardiac muscles in fruit flies may have unearthed a key discovery to help reverse the aging process in humans.
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To conduct the study, the researchers examined the flies’ autophagy — the process that recycles proteins and organelles that have been weakened. This process slows down with age, leading to weakened muscles that are no longer able to recover. The researchers also examined a key genetic pathway called mechanistic target of rapamycin or mTOR, which balances growth with nutrient intake and plays a role in the aging process. They found that by boosting mTORC2, which tends to decrease with age, they were able to reverse the aging process in the fruit flies, and strengthen the flies’ heart muscles.
Researcher Hua Bai explained, “Boosting the complex almost fully restored heart function.” He added, “The fly model can be useful for developing drug target discoveries that could have a big impact on human health.”
The aging process among humans and flies is similar. By middle age, the heart muscles weaken. When researchers analyzed video recordings of fruit flies’ cardiac muscles at different ages, they found that boosting mTORC2 could improve the heart function of a five-to-six-week-old fly to the stage it was when the fly was one to two weeks old. When you factor in that a flies’ lifespan is much shorter than a human’s, that would equate to the ability to improve a middle-aged adult’s heart function to the strength it had when they were a young adult.
Autophagy refers to a “self-eating” process in which your body digests damaged cells. It’s a cleaning out process that encourages the proliferation of new, healthy cells. The cyclicality of nutrition is an important component for health. Cells are either building or detoxing, and each phase has its own requirements. Cyclical ketosis and intermittent fasting suppress inflammation in your body and activate autophagy, a natural process that cleanses and detoxifies the cell and recycles the parts of the organelles that are no longer needed.
To activate autophagy, eat fats first and carbohydrates last, whether you’re intermittently fasting or not. Also include more autophagy-activating foods, such as citrus bergamot tea, green tea and turmeric. Cyclical exercise — doing 30 minutes of high-intensity interval training or resistance training every other day — also helps turn autophagy on and off.