#105 Does Exercise Stop Autophagy Because of mTOR Q&A

Siim Land (0:00)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and in this episode, we're going to talk about does exercise support autophagy, or does it break autophagy just because of stimulating mTOR and so on.

And it's one of those Q&A's I had on my YouTube live streams, and this quite an in-depth conversation about everything related to eating protein, stimulating mTOR, accelerating aging, and how does it all relate to fasting and autophagy. So it's a pretty dense episode, and I'm sure you're going to get some valuable information from it.

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So as many of you know, things like exercise and fasting and caloric restriction, all of those things, they do promote autophagy and cellular clearance and cellular turnover. And there are many benefits to it, longevity benefits, as well as greater fat burning benefits and reduced inflammation and everything related. But there's also the opposite side of that, which the opposite side of autophagy is anabolism and growing, which is mostly regulated by the pathway of mTOR or the signaling of mTOR. And there may be some confusion about mTOR, that mTOR is going to give a cancer and mTOR is going to accelerate aging. The reason is that mTOR dries protein synthesis and growth of all your cells. So if your mTOR is activated, then you're growing and with high levels of mTOR, you're also suppressing autophagy and you're preventing your healthy cells from being recycled. So it's like that, you know, it's a double-edged sword in the sense that you do want to have mTOR in adequate amounts to maintain lean muscle tissue and promote muscle growth, which is also pretty important for longevity. But at the same time, you don't want mTOR to get in the way of autophagy. You still want to get some autophagy, because deficient autophagy is also linked to accelerated aging. And not autophagy promotes all these diseases. And that's one of the reasons why, in my personal opinion, I believe that there are so many modern diseases related to nutrition. People simply stay in an anabolic state of elevated mTOR all the time throughout the entire day without ever going into the catabolic side, without allowing autophagy to do its work. And they've done a lot of studies on people where they look at what's their eating window, and they find that most people stay in a fed state for over 15 hours. Literally, they spend in a fed state more hours than they spend in a fasted state during the day. They start their eating window, they enter a fed state in the morning by adding even just a bit of milk or something into their coffee. And that starts their eating window because milk will spike mTOR a little bit. And they end their eating window by having a few snacks before going to bed. So they literally rarely ever go into autophagy, and they don't gain these benefits of allowing their body to heal itself. And they stay in an anabolic state continuously. And that's where almost the issues come from, mTOR being elevated all the time without allowing autophagy to kick in. Now we flip it over and you actually spend more time in a faster state, like with doing intermittent fasting and daily time-restricted eating, whether that be like the Warrior Diet or OMAD, then you're spending more time in an autophagic state, and with lower insulin, lower blood glucose and lower mTOR. So that's much more beneficial for your longevity, and that's more where you actually gain the positive side of mTOR, and you gain the positive side of autophagy as well. And that's like a completely different situation, completely different context. And there may be like, yeah, a lot of all of the confusions about mTOR being cancer comes from research done on populations that simply eat all the time. And there are virtually no studies on people who do these like longer fasts and who practice interpretive fasting continuously as a lifestyle thing every day. And yeah, I would imagine that the results from those things are very different. Which is why I believe we can all contribute to the development of science by practicing interpretive fasting every day and making sure that we do like get some, you know, N equals one experiments about our own results and about our own progress. So it's a good thing in a sense in the name of science. But, you know, the topic of this livestream that I wanted to talk about is that does exercise stop autophagy because of mTOR and, you know, mTOR gets elevated by certain things like nutrient factors, which would be things like insulin, blood glucose and amino acids. And it also gets elevated by growth factors such as size, especially like eccentric exercise. It enables the mTOR complex to be translocated more towards the cellular membrane and whenever you would eat, then mTOR would be used much more efficiently at that moment. And that's why, you know, working out, it doesn't necessarily directly make you build muscle because you are in a catabolic state. And working out itself promotes autophagy and promotes the breakdown of your cells to a certain extent. But it makes your body basically more sensitive to mTOR and the consumption of these nutrients like carbohydrates and amino acids. So resistance exercise itself isn't going to, you know, activate mTOR, which will then stop autophagy and put you into a fit state, if that makes sense. The resistance exercise only facilitates the further activation of mTOR in the post-workout feeding stage when you break the fast or when you stop exercising and when you eat something. And they also have done studies where mTOR gets activated during exercise if you consume adequate amounts of food before working out. And when you trigger protein synthesis before working out, then mTOR is also going to be activated during the workout. But if you work out in a faster state or if you work out in a very low insulin to glucagon ratio state, then in that case, you don't activate mTOR. You do actually the opposite. You actually activate AMPK, which is the kind of counter opposite of mTOR as well. AMPK promotes autophagy and AMPK promotes ketosis and AMPK basically breaks down all of your body's own fuel sources like liver glycogen and so on. So exercise promotes autophagy just because of AMPK as well. And it's not going to break autophagy during the workout unless you have eaten anything before. So to say if you work out in a if you work out in a fit state, then you don't activate that much autophagy because you have like those amino acids and some extra glycogen you have to burn through. Working out in a fasted state, on the other hand, does promote more autophagy. They have actually done studies like especially fasted cardio does promote more autophagy than in a fit state. Partly because of, I would believe, that there's going to be more AMPK, but also because of like lower circulating energy. So if you are if your energy depleted, you're lower in blood glucose, you're lower in insulin, you're lower in amino acids, you're fasting, then that's going to equal higher AMPK and lower mTOR and lower insulin, which are all the requirements for autophagy. And in the kind of the magic or the best thing about it is that that enables you to get the best of both worlds. Like you're able to build muscle while being in a fast state or not directly in a fast state, but you're able to build fast, you're able to build muscle while doing individual fasting every day. And you're not going to suffer from muscle catabolism as long as you flip the switch after you break the fast, so to say, after you stop working out, you break the fast with some food, then you would want to trigger mTOR, so to say. And I've been talking about this basically on all of my live streams already. But when you are fasting these longer fasts on a daily basis like OMAD or something like that, then you don't want to restrict your protein or you don't want to eat these very low calorie foods because you want to trigger mTOR and you want to trigger muscle protein synthesis in order to recover, especially if you are working out in a fasted state and a lot of the misconceptions are that some people aren't able to build muscle with intermittent fasting just because they don't flip the switch hard enough and they don't go into anabolism that hard. And the best foods for triggering muscle protein synthesis are things that contain leucine, because leucine is the most important or the most anabolic amino acid that triggers muscle protein synthesis.