Our cells divide all the time. Before that, their genetic material, the chromosomes (i.e. the DNA molecules) need to copy themselves or "replicate", so that the two new cells each have the full genetic package.
During this replication errors will occur. These errors may be meaningless if they don’t happen to hit our genes. But they might be very harmful if they happen to change a gene or other functional segment of DNA, which may lead to serious diseases (such as cancer), or death among other.
While each cell has its DNA repair mechanisms (as illustrated in the picture) and is able to undo many of these errors, no biological mechanism is perfect and certainly not the DNA repair techniques.
Errors will occur, and some of them won’t be fixed.
Furthermore, each DNA replication results in a DNA 'replica' that is several bases shorter than the original. Thus, our DNA gets shorter and shorter from the “finishing” end. While meaningless segments will be lost initially, one beautiful day this imperfect replication will start reaching valuable DNA segments. Even the loss of the initial “meaningless” DNA sequences can be functionally and structurally detrimental.
It is strongly believed that this is one of the mechanisms of aging.
What can be done to prevent all these defective changes from wearing down against our health and well-being?
Nothing at this point. To “prevent”, that is.
To slow down the defective changes, however, we can do a lot.
We can simply slow down our metabolism and thus, the rate of cell division.
How?
Fasting. First 1, then 3, then 5, then 7 days, then 12. Each period should be complemented by an equal number of days (or more) of normal nutrition. After repeating the 1-12-day cycle several times one may try the 21-day fasting. But very carefully and under supervision of experts.
Slowing down the assimilation of nutrients will lead to slowing down the entire complex of metabolic processes, and thus cell division and DNA replication.
Both aging will be slowed down and the probability of bad diseases (cancer) will decrease.
For overweight people this will lead to natural loss of weight and therefore the risk of the other prominent killers (coronaries and diabetes) will be down.
Of course, serious fasting should be done carefully, will be combined with some exercise, (not to let the muscles down) and some minimal quantity of food should be taken (some fruit, like bananas, peaches), some mixture of olive oil, lemon juice (and honey) should be taken.
Today we also know that hunger (as well as resveratrol - in red grapes, chocolate, blueberries) activates genes that enhance the organism abilities to deal with coronary factors, cancer, aging etc.
For longer fasting, bowels cleaning procedures are highly recommended.
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Biology
