The Diet to Protect Your Stem Cells

There’s a diet for everything today and about 20 different diets to “boost your stem cells.” We’re not sure that any of these are good for much other than filling up “health” magazines and your spam box. Everyone is unique and will respond to diets differently. Throw in the fact that these “scientific diets” are tested on mice and the fact that you’re not a mouse, and need I say more.

But there are a few important things you should know about diets that will help your health and your stem cells.

We eat too much as a society. While it’s important to eat, eating is stressful on the body and digestion requires a significant amount of energy. The stomach is an extremely acidic environment and cells in your stomach work overtime after your meals to secrete a mucus to protect the cells of the stomach from it’s acid, required to break down your food. With every meal, you force your cells to work, become subject to this dangerous acid, and begin creating new cells. It’s a lot of stress on your insides and if you’re eating 5, 6 or 7 times a day, you might want to reconsider.

Given this, should you consider fasting? Fasting is a new trend that biohackers are very excited about. While we are not telling you to try 24, 36 and 72-hour fasts, there are some benefits to eating only once or twice a day and giving your body time to recover between each meal.

First, it’s less taxing on your gut. Second, periods without food are actually good for you. Since your cells aren’t receiving nutrition from the body, they go into a semi survival mode. In this mode, they won’t be replicating (growing), which requires a significant amount of energy. Your cells will also focus more on protecting themselves. They’ll create enzymes to neutralize free radicals (molecules with unpaired electrons that can be damaging to other cells). They will focus on DNA repair as well.

During even a short fast too, your starved cells will begin to look for energy. In the human body, they will take to autophagy, which means they basically eat yourself. But this is good. They don’t eat randomly. They’re smart. Your cells will consume misfolded proteins, essentially cleaning up cellular waste.

Finally, not eating 5, 6, and 7 meals a day means that you won’t have a ton of extra nutrients floating around your system. When you overwhelm your body with excess nutrients, your stem cells in your fat will trigger to form new fat cells to store these nutrients. That’s one less stem cell available to you for any other degenerative disease you’d like to use it for.

So protect your stem cells and the rest of your cells. Eat a balanced diet. Find what’s right for you and don’t eat too much of it, but we also don’t recommend starving yourself. But some downtime between meals can go a long way to protecting yourself.