Last Updated on April 12, 2024 by Fasting Planet
It’s one of those unavoidable facts of life: sooner or later, time is going to catch up to you. You’ll feel more tired, perhaps achy and sore. Your hair may go gray, and your skin will begin to wrinkle and sag. People are always concocting ways to reach the so-called fountain of youth through serums and injections. Could it be that fasting can help turn around the effects of aging?
Fasting may be able to reverse aging through the production of beta-hydroxybutyrate, a ketone molecule that can halt vascular aging. This ketone also encourages cell multiplication and division, with the latter especially a sign that cells are young and healthy. Autophagy also aides in keeping your cells younger and disease-free.
Ahead, we’ll talk more about beta-hydroxybutyrate, autophagy, and what the research says about whether fasting can reverse aging. We’ll even suggest some intermittent fasts you can do to begin turning back the hands of time for yourself!
Let’s get started.
What Is Vascular Aging?
As you age, all parts of your body begin to change, like we said in the intro. That’s not just externally with the wrinkles and the gray hair, but internally as well. That’s why so many medical and scientific researchers focus on a specific area of aging known as vascular aging.
Vascular aging is referred to as one’s cardiovascular risk, or more simply, their heart age. It’s a gauge of heart health, as your heart is your most critical organ. That’s why, in a 2012 Frontiers in Physiology report, the authors mention the old quote that “man is as old as his arteries.”
It’s true. Poor vascular aging is what can cause an otherwise healthy 50-year-old man to drop dead from seemingly sudden cardiovascular disease or a heart attack. His arteries become stiffened, such as from smoking or high cholesterol, increasing the risk of death.
Three arterial wall layers are impacted by vascular aging. These are the adventitia, the media, and the intima.
Your adventitia is your blood vessel’s outer layer and is also referred to as the tunica adventitia. Made of elastic and collagenous fibers (aka collagen), the adventitia is the strongest arterial wall. Its barrier keeps your blood vessels from expanding too much.
The media or tunica media also contains collagen, as well as elastic tissue and smooth muscle cells. Sandwiched between the tunica externa and intima, the media has a unique fiber arrangement that the intima does not. It’s also a different color, making it easily distinguishable.
Finally, the intima or tunica intima is the third and most internal layer of the blood vessels. The name comes from a Latin term for “inner coat.” Your intima contains an endothelial cell layer, and these cells connect with your blood flow. The lamina provides support to the intima.
All parts of your arterial system age, including arteries big and small. This could lead to vascular brain damage, which too can accelerate a person’s chances of death.
What Causes Vascular Aging?
While vascular aging will indeed occur to a degree as you celebrate more birthdays, the lifestyle choices you make can progress this form of aging as well. Here are 8 causes of vascular aging to be aware of for your own health and that of your loved ones.
- Having High Triglycerides
Triglycerides are a type of ester that come from fatty acids and glycerol. In other words, they’re fat in your blood. When your triglyceride count gets too high, you develop what’s known as hypertriglyceridemia. You’re then more likely to have heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.
- Boosted C-Reactive Proteins
Your blood plasma should contain some C-reactive proteins, as these go up when bodily inflammation occurs. Excessive inflammation can lead to higher C-reactive protein counts, which makes your endogenous nitric oxide levels drop. This matters quite a lot because endogenous nitric oxide is a vasodilator, in that it keeps your blood pressure under control and allows blood to flow easily. Without endogenous nitric oxide, your blood pressure can go up.
- Hereditary Factors
If your family has a past of cardiovascular disease and other heart conditions, then your vascular aging can happen faster than a family without this type of health background.
- Calcification
Inflammation, connective and skeletal autoimmune diseases, calcium metabolism disorders, and infections can all lead to calcification. This occurs when your soft tissue, arteries, and bones receive too much calcium, which then hardens. In the arteries especially, the calcium causes blockages.
- Older Age
Your age and vascular age are sometimes correlated.
- High Cholesterol
Too much cholesterol in the blood causes your LDL cholesterol to increase and even your HDL cholesterol to decrease. You may then experience blood flow issues that can make you more at risk of having a stroke or heart attack.
- Smoking
We talked in a recent blog post how smoking can destroy your skin, but the tobacco chemicals also wreck your blood cells. If you smoke cigarettes long enough, your blood vessel and heart structure begin to deteriorate, leading the way for you to develop atherosclerosis. This condition causes plaques to form in your arteries, again making blockages that could spell an early death.
- Having Diabetes Mellitus
Diabetes mellitus, in which your body lacks insulin so it compensates by increasing your blood sugar, can make the arterial walls stiffen.
How Does Fasting Reverse Aging?
If you want to pause the hands of time and undo their effects, it’s all about what you don’t eat. Here are the ways fasting can reverse aging.
Increased Beta-Hydroxybutyrate
Now that you understand more about vascular aging, we can dive into the research on fasting for less vascular age damage.
The most interesting and recent study on the topic comes from the journal Molecular Cell in a report published in 2018. The report mentions that not only is vascular aging one of the main causes of having potentially deadly cardiovascular disease, but that senescence or cellular aging can also promote the development of vascular diseases that increase inflammation and could encourage vascular aging.
Georgia State University’s director of the Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine, Dr. Ming-Hui Zou, spearheaded the Molecular Cell study. As he said: “When people become older, the vessels that supply different organs are the most sensitive and more subject to aging damage, so studying vascular aging is very important.”
Thus, Dr. Zou and his team decided to see if fasting could impact vascular aging, perhaps stopping or even reversing it. Mice with atherosclerosis were studied before and after their deaths as part of the study. Living rodents with vascular aging fasted as well.
The Molecular Cell research team discovered that fasting mice made more beta-hydroxybutyrate. What exactly is this?
Beta-hydroxybutyrate is a molecule that comes from the liver and can improve brain and nerve functioning. It’s also an energy source that can better your exercise performance by giving the muscles more juice, so to speak, to function.
That’s because, besides being only a molecule, beta-hydroxybutyrate is considered a ketone as well.
If you need a refresher, a ketone is a water-soluble compound made in the liver. Ketone levels increase in the blood when your body lacks the glucose source it regularly uses for energy. What’s one way to deplete that supply of glucose? Fasting.
What does beta-hydroxybutyrate have to do with vascular aging? A lot! The endothelial cells in the lymphatic vessels and blood vessels age at a slower degree (senescence) with higher levels of beta-hydroxybutyrate. This can keep your blood vessels younger. Further, beta-hydroxybutyrate encourages healthy cells to both multiply and divide, which are trademarks of young cells.
Autophagy
If you’ve read our blog before, then you’d recognize that beta-hydroxybutyrate works a lot like autophagy, a form of cell recycling that removes old, damaged cells and keeps only the healthy, young ones.
Autophagy is important in reversing aging as well. We just published an article talking about how autophagy can keep the fibroblasts that produce collagen young and supercharged so your skin sags less. This can also ward off wrinkles, keeping you looking younger.
Of course, firmer skin is just one part of the equation. Can autophagy turn the other effects of aging around as well? It can indeed.
Not only does autophagy recycle fibroblasts, but other cells throughout the body. These include cells in the immune system. A healthier immune system is one that can detect foreign invaders as they arrive and successfully combat these before you even feel so much as a symptom.
Those symptoms aren’t just tied to common colds or flus, but more significant, life-threatening diseases. In a 2009 report from the journal Cell, the researchers concluded that autophagy could prevent the development of heart disease, cancer, neurodegeneration, and infections. A healthier you is one who lives longer.
Autophagy even elevates your neuroendocrine homeostasis. The neuroendocrine system includes the hypothalamus, which regulates areas such as blood pressure, osmolarity, how you use your energy, your drinking and eating habits, metabolism, and reproduction.
As you get older, your homeostasis tends to dwindle, which can lead to a lack of adaptive mechanisms that eventually can cause death. Thus, with your neuroendocrine homeostasis in-tune through autophagy, you have yet another way to turn back the hands of time.
Elevated Metabolites
Boosting your beta-hydroxybutyrate and autophagy aren’t the only ways fasting can reverse aging. A Being Patient article from 2019 mentions a study from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in association with Kyoto University.
The researchers at the two schools had four subjects go on extended fasts, with the first fast lasting for 34 hours and the second 58 hours. As the participants fasted, their metabolite levels were measured.
What’s a metabolite? As a metabolic end-product, a metabolite is a type of tiny molecule. Some metabolites begin to decrease as you get older, especially ophthalmic acid, isoleucine, and leucine.
Ophthalmic acid or ophthalmate is a glutathione tripeptide analog. Isoleucine is a type of a-amino acid that allows proteins to biosynthesize. Leucine is another amino acid that serves the same purpose.
One of the lead authors on the study, Dr. Takayuki Teruya, says those three metabolites “are very important…for maintenance of muscle and antioxidant activity, respectively.” Further, metabolites may impact aging, as can other metabolites, according to a 2014 report in the journal Microbial Cell.
Through Dr. Teruya’s study, when the four participants fasted, their levels of those three metabolites increased, as did more than 40 others. What’s even more fascinating is the researchers discovered 30 new metabolites through this study.
Now, as a caveat, this study was very small, involving only four participants. More research will definitely have to be done to solidify the effects of metabolites on reversing aging, but this is still a promising beginning.
Which Anti-Aging Fasts Should You Try?
The Kyoto University and Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University study talked about their participants going on prolonged fasts of nearly three days. That’s about the timespan necessary for autophagy to work its best. That said, autophagy will begin within 18 to 20 hours of fasting, so you need to fast for at least that long for anti-aging perks.
Here is a list of fasts to consider to reverse the hands of time.
16:8 Fast Modification
The 16:8 method requires you to break up 24 hours of the day into two periods: a fasting window and a non-fasting window. In this instance, the 16 hours a day are for fasting and the eight hours are for eating. You can tweak the 16:8 diet into any ratio that equals 24 hours a day.
For instance, some fasters will do an 18:6 diet where they eat for only six hours a day and then fast for the remaining 18 hours. You could even do a 20:2 fast if you wanted to really limit your diet window.
The 18:6 modification of the 16:8 diet may give you just enough time for autophagic processes to begin as you fast. When you can eat, make sure you avoid carbohydrates and sugars, as these foods can trigger a glucose response that may interrupt autophagy.
5:2 Fast
The 5:2 fast doesn’t mean you spend only five hours fasting and two eating. Instead, five days a week, you eat a modified diet of 500 to 600 calories a day, which is about a quarter of your daily recommended caloric load. Then, the other two days, you would go on a fast in which you drink only water and light caloric beverages like black coffee or green tea.
Since the fasting windows here are 24 hours apiece, you should be able to enter autophagy easily enough. To maximize your chances, we’d strongly consider organizing your 5:2 diet week so the two fasting days are consecutive.
Alternate-Day Fast
The alternate-day schedule requires fasting periods of 24 hours every other day of the week. You can start this fast whenever is most convenient for you, such as 8 p.m. to 8 p.m. so you can eat a filling dinner or even midnight to midnight.
Again, you’re only giving yourself a 24-hour window to enter autophagy, but that may be sufficient.
36-Hour Fast
One step up from the alternate-day fast is the 36-hour fast. Now instead of fasting for periods of 24 hours at a time, you refrain from eating for 36 consecutive hours.
Water Fast
To really get autophagy underway, you might consider a water fast. This is only recommended if you’ve done the above fasts successfully multiple times, as a water fast has no eating window. For 24 to 72 hours, you’d drink only black coffee, green tea, black tea, or water to satiate your appetite. Since you’re not adding any glucose to your system through food, you’d really be able to kickstart autophagy on a water fast.
Dry Fast
After a few water fasts, you might graduate to a dry fast. No food nor beverages are allowable on a dry fast. With a soft dry fast, you can brush your teeth, clean your face, shower or bathe, and wash your hands, but on a hard dry fast, all those behaviors are prohibited.
Conclusion
The elusive quest to find the fountain of youth has you trying every fad diet and trendy skincare product on the market, but have you thought about fasting to reverse aging? While fasting, you can ward off diseases through autophagy, reverse vascular aging through beta-hydroxybutyrate, and improve cell health with metabolites. Best of luck!