Eileen White, Ph.D.: Autophagy, fasting, and promising new cancer therapies

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
I guess this week is Professor Eileen White. Eileen is the Deputy Director and Chief Scientific Officer along with the Associate Director for Basic Research and the co-leader of the Cancer Metabolism and Growth Research Program at Rutgers University Cancer Institute in New Jersey. She received her bachelor's degree from RPI and her PhD from SUNY in Stony Brook and did her postdoc with Bruce Stillman at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Eileen's early work focused on apoptosis, but it was doing some of the work there that she stumbled upon autophagy. And that is the focus of our discussion today. Now, if you're even remotely familiar with this podcast, you'll certainly know that the concept of autophagy has come up on so many previous episodes. It is a fundamental pillar of health and maintenance of health. We talk a lot about it in the context of fasting in particular. I have wanted to sit down with Eileen for a really long time, and I don't think this conversation disappoints, although we certainly could have gone longer.
In this discussion, we talk about Eileen's career and how it morphed from studying apoptosis into autophagy. We go into describing the regulation of autophagy, both metabolically and otherwise.
And then we spend a lot of time talking about the role autophagy plays in both the prevention of disease and also the treatment of disease. And I think this is where it gets really interesting, especially around cancer. And I think that that's potentially one of the most confusing aspects of the entire discussion on autophagy. And that's actually one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to Eileen was to better understand something that at the surface seems confusing to me, which is that autophagy seems to very clearly protect a person or an organism from getting cancer. Yet once someone has cancer, it appears that autophagy may disproportionately benefit the cancer cell versus the non-cancer cell. So we tease this idea apart, along with talking about the amazing work that her lab has done to demonstrate the importance of autophagy in preventing Alzheimer's disease and neurodegeneration, along with the benefits of metabolic health. And of course, we do talk about the age-old question that many of you have heard me go on and on about, which is how do we delineate and understand the dosing and frequency of fasting as a tool? In other words, when I talk about doing a fast of three days every month versus seven days a quarter versus five days a quarter, how could we possibly get a handle on what the ideal strategy is? And so we talk a lot about that as well. And I'm actually quite hopeful that from this discussion comes some research that can shed light on that. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy my discussion on autophagy with Eileen White. Eileen, thank you so much for extending your trip in San Diego for a day to come and make time to talk with me about this stuff today.

**Eileen White** (3:48)
Oh, it's my pleasure. I'm looking forward to it.

**Peter Attia** (3:50)
I don't know if you remember this by the way, but David Sabatini introduced us a few years ago. Do you remember?

**Eileen White** (3:55)
I do.

**Peter Attia** (3:56)
Yeah, I still have my notes from that phone call five years ago.
I took about 20, maybe not 20, that's an exaggeration, maybe 10 pages of notes in my sort of journal and probably have gone back to those a dozen times in the last five or six years. So I always appreciate it when people just pick up the phone and talk to total strangers for no reason. So that's greatly appreciated.

**Eileen White** (4:17)
Well, you were excited about the science and so nerds like me like to talk about science.

**Peter Attia** (4:25)
Well, let's actually start from there.
Tell me where your interest in science came from. Was it something that was always in you from a young age? Were you just naturally curious?