RE: Becoming undead - How zombie cells make you older
The only natural way of killing senescent cells while preserving healthy ones is to induce AUTOPHAGY
Autophagy is your cells' metabolic pathway for self-digesting old and wasted cells and converting them back into energy. Basically, eating yourself for survival
What induces AUTOPHAGY?
It's still a mystery but the key factor is to suppress mTOR the most anabolic pathway that causes cellular growth.
To induce autophagy, you can do intermittent fasting, deplete your glycogen through carbohydrate restriction, and suppress insulin with the ketogenic diet
Fasting for longer than 48 hours is going to ramp up autophagy that puts you into a semi-catabolic state in which your cells start cleaning out the house. This is also going to preserve your lean muscle mass because after you shift into ketosis, you reduce muscle catabolism to close to zero and start burning exclusively your own body fat for fuel
Other ways to promote autophagy are exercise, sauna, coffee, turmeric, and berberine
Are you thinking about doing this topic as a post? If not, I would like to as @suesa to do one. She does some of the best biology research and work and she is willing to take requests when something looks fun (whoo hoo! directed research!) She is definitely worth looking up if you haven't seen her blog yet.
I actually read the "short-term fasting increases autophagy activity" thing a while ago but decided against writing a post about it, because the research I found wasn't meaningful enough (in my opinion, but maybe I was just too lazy to do deeper research). I mentioned it before tho:
From You're Being Eaten Alive
The corresponding sources:
Autophagy in general
Autophagy and fasting
With your skills I think you could easily make anything look interesting. Also you write posts with an incredible regularity, that's not laziness, maybe the topic did not struck the right chord in you and you simply decided to spend your time writing about something else
Interesting reading this right now, since I started doing this recently. I basically stop eating 4 hours before going to bed, which means 12 hours fasting every day. Easy peasy, and I'm already feeling more energetic and I'm sleeping better (unless of course it's placebo..).
That is an interesting observation, I think it may be worth writing a post about it and link some references to support those claims