How can we naturally boost the enzyme AMPK to slow aging without starving ourselves?

AMPK is activated by a fuel shortage.

If we don't want to limit the amount of energy going in through our mouths, then we have

to ramp up the amount of energy going out through our muscles.

Put people on a bike and start taking muscle biopsies while they cycle, and you can detect

a near tripling of AMPK activation within 20 minutes.

In both diabetics and non-diabetics, that makes sense. The muscles use up the

ATP to contract so AMP builds up and AMPK is activated. That may be one of the ways exercise

leads to weight loss. AMPK activation also leads to mitochondrial biogenesis, meaning the formation of extra mitochondria,

the power plants within our cells where fat is burned and ATP is created.

So, AMPK doesn't just cause more fat to be shoveled into the furnace, it also causes more

furnaces to be built.

In this way, AMPK helps explain why

endurance training eventually enables us to run faster and farther. So might an AMPK

activator be like the fabled exercise in a pill? Indeed, AMPK activation can dramatically

enhance performance. An AMPK activator drug given to sedentary mice for a month boosted their running endurance

by 44 percent.

After one such drug was discovered at the famed Tour de France,

AMPK activators were banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

So not just fasting in a pill, but an exercise memetic too.

People are often unwilling to perform even a minimum of physical activity,

wrote a group of pharmacologists,

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