Chapter 2

What Is Autophagy?

The Most Important New Breakthrough in the Science of Aging

On even the best of days, you stress about your family, your work, your friends, and all your responsibilities. Now, picture a day when everyone and everything is even more demanding: You feel absolutely overwhelmed. Everything is coming down on you. Your boss gives you a new project with a ridiculous deadline, your kids are sick, your best friend is having a personal crisis, your computer crashes, your phone has no signal, and someone just rear-ended you in the parking lot. Now let’s pretend you haven’t showered. Or slept. There is no relief at the end of the day or overnight. Your body and mind feel worn down and destroyed. What happens if the next day is exactly like this one? And then the next. And then the next. And so on.

At a cellular level, this is what aging is: Your cells get beaten up by the stresses of daily living. But the overbearing bosses and fender-benders come in the form of such things as environmental toxins, processed foods, and chronic stress. Over time, they wear on your cells, causing damage. That damage ultimately results in signs of aging like weight gain, wrinkles, pigmentation, and even neurological diseases and cancer.

Now picture that same overwhelming day. At the end of it, instead of no sleep, no shower, and nothing to make it better, you get the exact opposite: a nice warm bath, a glass of wine, and restful, uninterrupted beauty sleep that leaves you revived and refreshed when you wake the next day. You feel like the you of your youth—alive, happy, ready for whatever awaits.

At a cellular level, that is autophagy. It cleans up the mess left behind from your overwhelming day and repairs any damage, restoring and rejuvenating your cells. Your cells function better, your body runs better, you look and feel better. Autophagy, a little known but fundamental process, is the key to antiaging and the foundation of Glow15. While you can’t completely avoid the causes of aging, you do have control over how your body ages. Glow15 will give you that power—and in this chapter I’ll explain why boosting autophagy can help you defy aging. My hope is that you will be as excited about the science behind Glow15 as I am to share it.

The journey that has led me to this moment reminds me of when I moved to the United States from England at the age of eleven. I was obsessed with braiding friendship bracelets like I had done for the past couple of years in the UK. Nobody in my new school had ever seen them. I knew my new classmates would love them. I started a school-wide trend, which helped me make friends quickly, and I realized how much I enjoyed sharing new things with others.

Thirty-plus years later, it’s still thrilling to me. I love being able to pass along something new, oftentimes from a different part of the world, that can be translated into better health, wellness, beauty, and strength. For my career, that sharing has come in the form of nutritional supplements that help improve women’s health and well-being. In all, I have spent the last twenty years developing patented nutritional ingredients as well as science-based products designed to improve our natural beauty, increase our longevity, and restore energy and wellness.

Glow15 is my new friendship bracelet—but instead of wearing it on your wrist, you will be empowered by its ability to help you radiate better health from the inside out.

How We Age

What happens with an old phone? Things get a little slower, the apps don’t work quite as well, sometimes they crash because they can’t keep up, and we get so frustrated that we just wind up trashing it and upgrading to the newer, smarter, faster technological toy. In that scenario, the device experienced wear and tear, and just couldn’t keep up with today’s demands.

That sounds a lot like our bodies. As we get older, we want to keep doing what we were doing when we were in our twenties, but our insides—all our anatomical hardware and software—just can’t keep up. Oh sure, it would be nice to upgrade to a new model every time things got a little slower (“Hey, time for the iBody X!”). And yes, when our screen cracks (in the form of new wrinkles!), it sure would be nice to go in and just replace it with a shiny new one. But our bodies are much more complex than even the smartest of phones. Our bodies can’t be replaced. We need the ones we have to keep running as smoothly, quickly, and efficiently as possible, for as long as possible.

The question then becomes, if we can’t trade in our bodies, how can we super-boost our insides and outsides—or upgrade them to not only last longer, but act newer?

To best understand how you can use autophagy to upgrade your body, let’s look at why our bodies get slower and less efficient.

Aging, of course, is a complex topic. There’s not one thing that makes us go from young to old. An interwoven system of biological reactions can contribute to the way we age. We don’t even see the deterioration happening at first—these cellular changes are invisible signs of aging. We start slowing down before we, well, start slowing down. While we tend to think of aging as a visible process—as we see wrinkles or weight gain—the reality is that aging has already started at the cellular level. How?

There are a multitude of mechanisms that contribute to aging, but I like to categorize them into two main groups: the Inevitable Agers and the Accelerated Agers.

The Inevitable Agers: These are, exactly as their name implies, the inevitable causes of aging—the natural wear and tear on your body. The Inevitable Agers reinforce the idea that over time, your body naturally starts to slow down and wear down. In the absence of some sort of intervention to stop it, our minds, our metabolism, our muscles, our joints, our eyesight, our hearing, and just about every other system in the body naturally slows.

The irony, of course, is that the human body is complex. Some parts of our bodies, if they weren’t used at all, would wither up. It’s the old “use it or lose it” mantra. That’s the case with our brains; we need to constantly flex our mental muscles to keep them sharp. That’s how memory is strengthened; when neurons are used to learn something new or perform mental tasks, the connections in the brain are strengthened. That’s the case with our bones; in order to keep them strong, we need to put them through stress to regenerate new bone. That’s the case for our lean muscle mass as well; muscle grows and fortifies when we use it.

The option isn’t to not put our bodies through wear and tear. The very fact that you’re living a full and active life means many of your cells and systems will degenerate because you’re using them.

The Accelerated Agers: These are outside forces that damage your cells and speed up both the visible and invisible signs of aging. While the Inevitable Agers cause the aging-related degeneration you can’t avoid, the Accelerated Agers are the exact opposite—you can avoid these factors that will wreak havoc on your body, leading not only to more wrinkles and weight gain, but also to age-related diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.

The most common Accelerated Agers are:

Foods with added sugar. Added sugar increases your body’s demand for insulin—a hormone that helps your body convert food into energy. That excess insulin stresses your system, causing many different types of cellular malfunction, which leads to aging-related diseases and conditions like diabetes, heart problems, and high blood pressure. Added sugar also reacts with protein, creating advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) that age the skin, causing skin to wrinkle and cell structures to harden. Think of the way arteries harden to cause coronary heart disease: A similar process takes place in the cells of the skin.

Robert H. Lustig, a professor of pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, is considered the leading authority on the dangers of sugar. Dr. Lustig says that your body can safely metabolize up to 6 teaspoons of added sugar per day, yet the average American consumes 19.5 teaspoons (82 grams) every day. That translates to about 66 pounds of added sugar per person, per year. It’s not surprising that there’s a chronic disease crisis.

Environmental toxins, such as excess UV exposure, pollution, and cigarette smoke. These toxins enter your body—via your mouth or skin—and damage your cells. Excessive sun exposure breaks down the cells to not only cause the sunburn you see on the outside, but also damage skin-related cells and structures to make the cellular environment toxic, leading to the development of skin cancer.

Other accelerators, including a sedentary lifestyle—sitting is the new smoking!—and lack of sleep, contribute to signs of aging. According to the Sleep Health Foundation, nearly half of us aren’t getting enough shut-eye, and women have a harder time sleeping and are more likely to feel unrested than men.

There’s more to the story of aging: Scientific research pinpoints the causes more specifically and has classified a number of different factors, systems, and mechanisms that contribute to the deterioration of our cells. They include inflammation, DNA damage, genetics, dysfunction of the mitochondria (the power plants of the cells), hormonal changes, neural degeneration, and muscle composition. The complex part about aging is that there’s no single cause—it’s the interconnections among all these factors. It’s not like you can just get a prescription to bulk up your mitochondria and voilà!—all is well.

But here’s the good news: Glow15 is an approach that includes diet, exercise, sleep, and skincare solutions (not just one magic bullet) to address the complexity of factors, causes, and relationships in the body that cause aging.

Remember, you can control 70 percent of aging-related symptoms and problems by controlling the Accelerated Agers and staving off or slowing down the Inevitable Agers.

The Big Picture: The Origins of Autophagy

Battling the visible and invisible signs of aging is very much a part of what led me on my search to better understand the science of autophagy.

In the 1950s, Belgian scientist Christian de Duve was studying insulin when he accidentally discovered a process he called autophagy, from the Greek words for “self” (auto) and “eating” (phagy). It is the mechanism by which cells cannibalize some of their own parts in a continual cleanup process.

In the 1970s and ’80s, researchers began looking at the process of autophagy. It had not been studied extensively at the time, and nobody really knew its role or why it was important. The big breakthrough came in 1983, when researcher Yoshinori Ohsumi, while conducting experiments in yeast, discovered the genes that regulate autophagy. He found that without those genes, autophagy doesn’t work—and the cells can’t repair themselves. He won the Nobel Prize in 2016, as his work was considered fundamentally important to understanding how autophagy functions in cells.

The most fascinating part of the discovery of autophagy is that the process is given a boost if there is cellular stress. If cells lack nutrients, are deprived of energy, or are damaged in some way, a “stress response” mechanism is activated, which initiates autophagy. As a result, cell function actually improves when we’re under stress. In the absence of added stress, autophagy remains functioning at a moderate level, maintaining cell function. This is known as its maintenance mode.

As the research evolves, more and more scientists will be looking at the role of autophagy in aging—and how it is influenced by cellular stress, and that includes the Inevitable and Accelerated Agers.

On my quest to learn from the leading experts, I met William A. Dunn Jr., PhD, a professor of anatomy and cell biology at the University of Florida and one of the most respected authorities on autophagy, who has been studying the process for more than thirty years. He explained that as your cells get older, parts of the cells age and become nonfunctional. “Autophagy is a way of rejuvenating the cell,” he said. “It basically gets rid of the nonfunctional components of the cell.”

The thinking goes that when you activate autophagy, you reduce the chance of developing age-related problems and thus extend your life span. One study from the Journal of Clinical Investigation supports this theory by showing that things that extend longevity also show an increase in autophagy. That’s partly because, as another study from the journal Cell shows, one of the characteristics of aging is the accumulation of various forms of “molecular damage.” The study authors noted that one of the most promising areas in combating that damage is autophagy.

How does it combat that damage? It’s your cellular cleansing cleanup crew.

Autophagy 101: Your Cellular Cleansing Cleanup Crew

In most aspects of our life, we have no self-cleaners. Sure, there’s the self-cleaning oven, and our computers can do it, too, with automatic virus scans and whatnot. But most other things require some time and attention to remove the grime, dirt, and waste that accumulate over time. Wouldn’t it be nice to have self-cleaning bathrooms? But think of what would happen if we didn’t maintain our “things” with regular cleaning. Our kitchens, cars, and desks would become toxic cesspools of dirt, and they would be sickening. That, in a way, is what can happen to our cells. If waste and toxins are not properly disposed of, our cell functions degrade and decline, resulting in everything from dull skin to lackluster energy to weight gain to age-related diseases.

This is exactly what autophagy, your cellular self-cleaner, addresses. Remember, it literally means “self-eating” because your cells eat away their own junk.

The result? Cleaner, younger, healthier cells.

Let’s take a look at how it works more specifically: Our bodies are like little universes. But instead of stars, they’re made up of trillions of cells, all of which play a role in how we function and how we live. They’re made up of a variety of parts that influence those cellular functions. For example, we have the mitochondria, which generate energy for the cell. Cells also include proteins, which are essential for virtually all cellular functions: They give structure to cells, they carry out chemical reactions in the body, and they serve as messengers to communicate a variety of information across the body.

Though they’re microscopic units, each cell chugs and churns, producing power and products that make your body function the way it does. These cells are doing the work that makes us think, move, feel—everything. These cells give you the power to send texts, remember song lyrics, calculate mortgage payments, write life-changing memos, reason logically with toddlers (well, maybe our systems haven’t quite been able to master that yet!), and everything else you do throughout your days.

These cells are always working. Most of the time, they do great work, especially when they’re young. Everything is brand-new, all systems are working in harmony, and things keep plugging along without a hitch. The cells do their jobs well and efficiently, and the end result is a young, energized, healthy body.

That doesn’t mean each cellular system works perfectly all the time. Our normal cellular machinery gets damaged with use over time through those Inevitable and Accelerated Agers I explained earlier. Many people assume that wear and tear is a fact of life—that no matter what we do, our bodies are going to break down because of aging. Certainly, we can’t defy the natural arc of life and death, but we can indeed stall the effects of aging. Here’s why.

Your cells break down parts of themselves by sequestering them into vacuoles and digesting them. As a result, they produce waste, mainly dead organelles, damaged proteins, and oxidized particles, and that waste needs to be removed. But unless it’s properly disposed of, that cellular waste stays and builds up in the body, becoming toxic to our cells. That accumulation is a key factor in the rate of aging. The junk gets in the way and makes everything malfunction. It may sound like jargon from biology class, but the reality is that when the toxins damage the machinery of your cells, it contributes to the aging process—it causes your skin to look older, your body to slow, your energy to drop, and your hormones to go haywire.

I don’t want that, and I know you don’t either.

That’s why autophagy is so important. It’s like a cellular garbage disposal, taking the dysfunctional parts and obliterating them so they don’t cause a mess anywhere else. When it’s working well, it’s a form of self-renewal, breaking down older structures so that new ones can be built in their place. The result is that the newer, more youthful structures allow our cells to function as if they’re, well, newer and more youthful!

You can imagine how that plays out in your everyday life. More youthful cells means softer and healthier skin, less fatigue, a faster metabolism—it means your universe of cells radiates youthfulness everywhere, from your organs to your brain to your muscles to your mental well-being.

I met with leading autophagy researcher Beth Levine, MD, director of the Center for Autophagy Research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The expectation of her research is that it will lead to major discoveries in the treatment of aging, diseases like cancer, and infectious diseases. Her lab identified the first known gene responsible for autophagy in mammals. She says the trash-removal function is what keeps us healthy.

In a study in the journal Diabetes & Metabolism, the authors described autophagy as a “survival strategy,” which makes a lot of sense: From a cellular perspective, we’re just trying to survive. From a lifestyle perspective, the strategy to survive becomes a strategy to thrive—because younger cells mean a younger self.

The Autophagy On/Off Switch

So why doesn’t autophagy work well all the time? Autophagy is like everything else in your body: As you age, it naturally declines and becomes less efficient—meaning that you’re now saddled with a twofold problem. Your cells accumulate a lot of junk and your body can’t keep up with clearing away that junk due to your constant exposure to Accelerated Agers (see page 16). More waste equals more damage. More damage, with no way to fix it, equals increased aging.

All that cellular waste is linked to not only things like skin damage, but also cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s. This decline in autophagy is considered a vital consequence of aging. It’s not just the deterioration of our cells that’s so bad; it’s also the decline in our ability to fix it.

There’s another important point to consider: Autophagy can't always be on high. Cells can’t be constantly cleaning up waste; they also have to be doing the work that produces the waste. Think about it like this: Picture your kitchen. Let’s say you make dinner and clean up after the meal. This multistep process includes preparing the meal and getting rid of the waste after you eat.

So autophagy is a series of steps that keep your cellular kitchen free of clutter, and you need them all to work. If there’s a pileup at the sink or the kitchen trash or the outside trash can, there will be clutter somewhere.

But the catch is that you can’t always be in cleaning mode; you have to have something to clean up. You need the kitchen to prepare your food, just in the way that your cells need to be doing other jobs. So when a kitchen is truly humming, it’s a balance between making food and cleaning waste. Ideally, that’s the same process for your cells—providing energy to your whole body and then cleaning up the waste products. This is the idea behind autophagy being turned on and off. When the kitchen is being cleaned, in response to that stressor, autophagy is working at its highest level—remember the stress-response mode. And when you’re making and eating dinner, autophagy is at its lowest level—the maintenance mode. Think of it this way—it’s like electricity. If you plug in a lamp, the electricity is always flowing whether the switch is turned on or off, but more electricity is needed to power it on.

Glow15 will show you the best ways to turn autophagy on and off to defy aging. There are two ways to do this: First, naturally induce some stress on your body; and second, integrate autophagy-activating nutrients. Since most of us, as a result of those Inevitable and Accelerated Agers, have low levels of autophagy, I’ll show you how to boost your cellular cleansing cleanup crew’s function so you look and feel younger.

Advanced Autophagy: The Missing Link in Antiaging

Autophagy is one of the most important breakthroughs in the science of aging. While scientists have known about this process since the 1950s, only in the past decade have we been able to see the effects of activating autophagy to improve our cellular health. Research published in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Pathology explains that “autophagy promotes cell maintenance by removing accumulated toxic material and by using recycled components as an alternative nutrient resource. This suggests that autophagy favors longevity because an organism can recover more quickly from stress-induced cellular damage.” As you can imagine, when the cells can effectively clean up the damage that they produce, that means they will function better.

In practical terms, that means all of your body’s cells will work better.

Autophagy enhances metabolic efficiency. From the deepest cellular level, autophagy can be activated to help improve the work of the mitochondria—the cell’s power plant. This makes cells work more efficiently. By doing so, autophagy helps cells become more resilient.

Autophagy prevents neurodegenerative disorders. Many neurodegenerative disorders are the result of damaged proteins that form in and around neurons. Autophagy protects us by getting rid of these proteins. In Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s, autophagy cleans up specific proteins associated with those diseases.

Autophagy helps fight against infectious diseases. It does this by removing toxins that create infection, as well as by helping to improve how your body’s immune system responds to infections. Intracellular bacteria and viruses can be removed by autophagy.

Autophagy improves muscle performance. When exercising, we place a stress on our cells, energy goes up, and parts get worn out faster. Because of this, autophagy helps remove some of the damage and keep our energy needs in check.

Autophagy aids in the prevention of cancer growth. Autophagy suppresses systems and processes that can be related to the development of cancer, such as chronic inflammation and damaged DNA. Mice altered to have inefficient autophagy were found to have higher cancer rates.

However, cancer cells can hijack the process of autophagy and use it to their advantage to become chemo resistant. In later stages of cancer, as tumors begin to take over cells, autophagy is induced due to the stress of nutrient deprivation and energy depletion. This is why it is important to understand that autophagy should be turned on and off. Further research is needed since currently there is no way to measure the level of autophagy in humans when it comes to this area.

What science can tell us today is that autophagy works to make your body work better. By cleaning up cellular junk, you will clear the way for cells to rebuild themselves with new parts. Sort of like that biological upgrade—giving an older car a newer engine, so that it not only keeps running, it “corners like it’s on rails” (that’s a good thing, for those of you who haven’t seen the movie Pretty Woman!).

How to Activate Autophagy: The Foundation of Glow15

In today’s world, we tend to look at things as black or white—no gray. Things are either good or bad. But when you really think about it, life is full of examples that are both good and bad at the same time—even things that have positive effects can have negative ones. Take the smartphone. It has unbelievable powers, and the technology has made our lives so much easier, but some would also argue that it has eroded social skills and created many more burdens on families as well. Or about how the sun? It’s unquestionably good because of its life-giving properties, but too much of it can kill us. What about fire? It provides warmth, it kills germs, and it can be essential for survival. But when left uncontrolled, fire can wreak havoc.

Glow15 Success Story

Kerry “The first plan that’s worked for me”

“Glow15 changed my life—and my body! I lost almost 10 pounds in the first 15 days, and by the next 15 days my body fat percentage went down 3 percent and my waist was 3 inches smaller. Until my late 30s, I didn’t really worry about my weight—but two kids, and too much eating off their plates later, the pounds just started creeping up. I got to a point where I almost didn’t recognize myself. I tried a few things, but I didn’t see the results fast enough, so I gave up. And then I tried Glow15—and the changes were almost immediate. Everything about this plan was new for me. First of all, it worked—that was new (ha). A lot of the autophagy-activating foods were new: I’m 46 years old and I had never had an avocado—I didn’t even know how to cut it. And quinoa was new too—I still can’t pronounce it correctly and forget about spelling it—but I love to cook it. I didn’t actually believe the numbers on my scale—they went down so quickly. People at work started asking what I was doing differently and telling me how great I looked. Now they have to listen to me ‘fake complain’ about my clothes being too big! Even my bra is bigger—but in a good way, I’m perkier now!”

This “gray area” is essential to understanding how autophagy is activated via cellular stress.

Remember, autophagy is turned on when your body is in stress-response mode. Stressing your cells is the natural way to turn on autophagy. On Glow15, you’ll do this through intermittent fasting and protein cycling (more here) to create nutrient deprivation in your cells. You can also create cellular stress in the body through exercise (more on that here).

I will show you novel ways to manufacture or hack your autophagy activation. By taking polyphenol-rich supplements and using unique nutritional ingredients, you can control your autophagy.

And that means you can influence the way you age.