SethianSeth said:
I wonder if this may be the beginning of proper autophagy (something I am pretty sure I don't hit properly after reading Kruse's material)?
I think here is the post where he explained it the clearest:
http://jackkruse.com/the-quilthow-to-beat-agin/
Stem Cell depots. This one, I bet, will move up as I age. I think what we are learning now is nothing short of amazing. As autophagy and apoptosis take out cells as they age, get infected with vectors, eliminated by ROS, ALEs, AGEs, and many other things, they get replaced with new cells that are not differentiated as yet that are hiding in our stroma as “soldiers in waiting.” The real issue is we do not appear to have an unlimited supply of them. Science now is challenging that assertion and I hope they are right, because if they are, we all might start living a long time.
The key to this levee is time and context. My theory holds that if you deplete your depot too early in life, your lifespan is shortened tremendously. In fact, I will be less tactful: If you abuse your body from ages 0-40, I think it has greater effects than if you abuse your body from 40-80. The reason is simple: The less we need to replace early in life allows us to have many more as we age when the effects of time and cellular damage accumulate. This is why the major diseases in humans all get more common as we age. We no longer have the reserves we once had. If science proves that we can go back and create pluripotential cells and reengineer our stem cell depot then this risk certainly lessens. Right now this option does not exist. Damaging your depot includes poor dietary choices, trauma, cellular and emotional stress, and endurance exercise. We need to protect our stem cells at every age but we tend to lose most of them when we are young because we do not employ a levee strategy until we get to the back half of life.
Here is the concept of autophagy explained in a "non-Kruse" way :
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120120184528.htm
ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2012) — The health benefits of exercise on blood sugar metabolism may come from the body's ability to devour itself, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report in the journal Nature.
Autophagy is a process by which a cell responds to starvation and other stresses by degrading damaged or unneeded parts of itself to produce energy. It is sometimes called the cell's housekeeping pathway.
[...]
"Our finding that exercise fails to improve glucose metabolism in autophagy-deficient mice strongly suggests that autophagy is an important mechanism by which exercise protects against diabetes," said Dr. Levine. "It also raises the possibility that activation of autophagy may contribute to other health benefits of exercise, including protection against cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and aging.
Dr. Levine has made fundamental discoveries previously that are in large part credited for expanding the field of autophagy research. In 1999, she identified the first mammalian autophagy gene, beclin 1, and its link to the suppression of breast cancer, which marked the first discovery of an association between defects in an autophagy gene and a human disease.
She similarly is credited with demonstrating that autophagy functions in innate immunity -- protecting against lethal viral encephalitis -- as well as initially reporting that autophagy plays a role in lifespan extension, shown in a study of C. elegans worms.
Something I am still unclear about when it comes to "becoming cold adapted" is whether this is smart in the summer/spring time and how much cold immersion/exposure will be needed in order to sustain it through hot weather. Anybody have ideas about this?
I guess we'll find out. It seems to me that the point of doing cold adaptation is to restore and heal your body, which is increasingly more difficult in such a stressful and polluted environment.
Right now, I feel I can do iced water, but I just did 11 sessions of cryotherapy. I'm not sure 2 weeks down the road, especially if I didn't kept up with my cold showers...
A long-term protocol, at least with cold showers and cold immersion when there is time and one is more adapted, sounds interesting.