Hi Jane,
re: protein intake and autophagy. Common sense says you may be correct, but I could not find any studies, medical articles or firm evidence as to the length of time autophagy would turn off once your body recognized protein intake. For example, if you digest all the protein from your last meal, I was under the impression then that it takes some time after the last protein digestion for autophagy to turn on. I would kind of expect a similar thing, whereby if you ate a piece of meat, you would turn autophagy off. Would it actually only be for a few hours as you suggest, maybe. Could it also possibly take another 12 or more hours to re-initiate, maybe? Here is where I get stuck. Think about a mouthful as “little” and therefore unimportant. suppose you increased from a little or tiny amount to a slightly bigger small amount. In theory (going by your thinking), you would be able to eat small meals and still get into autophagy once the small meal is digested in a few hours. This does not quite feel correct to me.
If you have any hard evidence/links please let me know, this particular question has been bugging me. I had a brief e-mail exchange with Jason Fung a month ago on this topic, but unfortunately I was not specific enough in my original question, and his response did not address the question and was essentially was meant for a complete newbie (or idiot?), so it was not helpful. He did not respond to my response asking with more details - it was free and on his own time, so no hard feelings, but I did not get an answer to my questions on autophagy.
