ApoE4.Info

Some background--I am 3/4. I have been in ketosis most of the time for a few years. My A1C has gone from about 6 to about 5 and I lost 80 lbs. I still eat as low carb as possible. Eating a high carb meal used to take me out of ketosis for days. Now I am getting metabolically flexible in that I can have a high carb meal and be back in ketosis in a day or 2.

I have breakfast at 11 am dinner at 5 pm and go to bed between 8 and 9 pm. I start the day with coffee or if I have some allergies, with shade grown green tea around 5 or 6 am and then meditate. I have been getting information from places that claims coffee breaks the fast. My experience suggests this may not be the case so I did a Google Scholar search on coffee and autophagy and the majority of the abstracts suggested that coffee promoted autophagy.

It seems as though a lot of what's out there regarding autophagy and coffee is based on youtube talks rather than science.

Physiology and biochemistry are not my strong points. What do we know about coffee, intermittent fasting, and breaking the fast?

From one of the first articles to come up:
"Altogether, these results indicate that coffee triggers 2 phenomena that are also induced by nutrient depletion, namely a reduction of protein acetylation coupled to an increase in autophagy. We speculate that polyphenols contained in coffee promote health by stimulating autophagy."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4161/cc.28929

lawson415 wrote:From one of the first articles to come up:
"Altogether, these results indicate that coffee triggers 2 phenomena that are also induced by nutrient depletion, namely a reduction of protein acetylation coupled to an increase in autophagy. We speculate that polyphenols contained in coffee promote health by stimulating autophagy."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.4161/cc.28929

I don't think that intermittent fasting results in much if any autophagy since the time frame is so short. What it does do brilliantly is help to maintain insulin sensitivity. So in the case of coffee if you are drinking it without cream and sugar/artificial sweetener then there shouldn't be much if any insulin response. In that case you are maintaining the intermittent fasting state with no significant insulin spikes. Drinking plain, black coffee should have little if any negative impact on your fast with regard to insulin sensitivity. At least that's my takeaway from what I've seen from Rhonda Patrick and Peter Attia.

If you want autophagy you will likely need to fast longer, although from what I have gathered we can't draw too many conclusions for humans at this point as the studies with solid data are on other species like mice. I do five day fasts primarily because I don't want to do daily intermittent fasts and because Valter Longo has done a lot of research on fasting and promotes a five day fast every 6 months for those who are reasonably healthy and in good shape. I don't know that I'm getting any real uptick in autophagy, but I can see from my ketone meter and from my blood glucose readings that I am in ketosis and that my blood sugar level has dropped off significantly.

After my last 5 day fast I hit 3.2 mmol/dL for ketones and 72 blood glucose. I got my blood glucose measured at a recent doctor's appointment and it was at 88. It's been at that level for the past year whenever I am not doing a five day fast. So the tradeoff I make is one five day fast every six months and then eat fairly regularly every day between the fasts. I just don't like intermittent fasting so I go a different route.

Intermittent fasting is clearly working for you so keep up the great work! Regarding autophagy, I think we're all extrapolating from animal studies and trying to figure out what would be the equivalent amount of time for humans. Another thing to keep in mind is the mice in these autophagy studies lose something like 20-25% of their bodyweight during these fasts. That is difficult if not outright dangerous for many humans to attempt.

Thank you SoCalGuy.

I stopped being concerned about this. What I'm doing is working. Most notably is that my cognition and mood are consistent throughout the day. When I ran on carbs, if I did not eat within half an our of awakening, I melted down. I had to have a meal every 5 to 6 hours or melt. And this was on complex carbs- no sugar or fruit. Now I'm pretty stable all the time with excellent lipid profile and without insulin resistance or so my doc tells me.

lawson415 wrote:Thank you SoCalGuy.

I stopped being concerned about this. What I'm doing is working. Most notably is that my cognition and mood are consistent throughout the day. When I ran on carbs, if I did not eat within half an our of awakening, I melted down. I had to have a meal every 5 to 6 hours or melt. And this was on complex carbs- no sugar or fruit. Now I'm pretty stable all the time with excellent lipid profile and without insulin resistance or so my doc tells me.

Yeah, the most important things are that you are getting great results and are doing it in a way that is sustainable. Keep up the great work!

When I lived in the moldy house, i would have got a dementia diagnosis. A few years of mold avoidance moved me up to MCI. Now I'm doing medical hardware and software development again after adding the Bredesen stuff and fixing methylation, etc, SNPs.

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I’ve often wondered if there’s hard evidence to show that a little cream in coffee stops the benefits of fasting. If one adds a little coffee to a cup of milk I can see it, but a teaspoon of milk to coffee and all’s lost? May be true, I just don’t understand it. On the surface, quite literally, if the intestinal wall is the size of a football field (or something like that), it just doesn’t seem to add up that a teaspoon or two of a “creamer” ends the fast. Is it that it triggers a signaling pathway that then obliterates the whole benefits-of-fasting pathway? Is this hypothetical or shown in mice or ...?