When Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey posted a Tweet about his 22 hour fast, it started a lot of buzz on cleansing and intermittent fasting. However Dorsey’s eating routine goes beyond fasting; it kicks off a process called autophagy. This sounds like the latest version of fasting but as the hype around it grows, so has others’ interest in cell cleaning.

Shortly after Dorsey’s post, a popular paleo lifestyle site called Mark’s Daily Apple circulated the “Definitive Guide to Autophagy”. He dubbed it as cellular pruning but it’s more appropriate to call it self eating. Not surprisingly, autophagy became the hot button topic in many blogs and articles thereafter.

In intermittent fasting, people fast for long periods of time to trigger autophagy. This programmed cleansing is aimed at disease protection. It is assumed that when external sources of food are absent, the human body engages is self eating (auto meaning self and phage is...