Top signs your body’s clean up mechanism is clogged up & in need of an MOT, and why it matters to optimal health and longevity

Luckily the body ‘won’t go rusty’ nor clog up quite that quickly. It in fact has some wonderful built-in mechanisms to clean up and repair its cogwheels, to keep the machinery running smoothly, and prevent it from braking prematurely.

Some of these mechanisms include:

• Autophagy = a process that helps recycle and repair sick, old and mutated cells
• Apoptosis = a process that helps kill off and gets rid of cells no longer wanted, without leaving behind scarring or debris.
• Cellular senescence and senolysis
• Stem cells = cellular renewal
• Lymphatic system = drainage throughout the body
• Glymphatic system = drainage in the brain
• Liver detox = our liver can break down numerous toxic substances
• Bile = Fluid transporting toxins and excess cholesterol from the liver into the gut for excretion
• Kidney detox = helps the body filter waste to excrete through the urine
• Sweating = while it is our liver, kidneys and gut doing the heavy lifting of detoxing aka getting rid of toxins, we do eliminate some pollutants through sweat, including heavy metals and microplastics.

However, it is when these mechanisms decline or are overwhelmed by the amount of damage and toxins they are exposed to, if the ‘waste removal’ has become overburdened (R), that the scale tips towards gradual decline and cellular ‘rusting’.

‘MOT’s’ on a cellular level

Advanced glycation end products

For example, advanced glycation end products, also called ‘AGEs’, caused by sugar attaching to protein and fats inside our body, accumulate, literally ‘aging’ us from the inside out.

Senescent ‘zombie’ cells

Old, mutated and sick cells that should have died linger. Some of these are called senescent cells, aka ‘zombie cells’. These are cells that stopped ‘living’ but won’t go away, much like the zombies we know from soap opera movies.

Senescence has a purpose. It stops the over-replication of damaged and dysfunctional cells, thereby acting as an important anti-tumour mechanism. When cells suffer severe damage including oncogene (cancer gene) activation, they enter this state of permanent, irreversible growth arrest (= senescence), rather than to keep dividing and potentially forming tumours (R).

However, in a healthy organism, these ‘protective, half-dead’ cells then should be dissolved and deposed of, a process called senolysis. When that doesn’t happen, and they stick around, that’s when the damage happens. Senescent cells secrete senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), inflammatory molecules, that ‘infect’  and damage their neighbouring cells, contributing to the chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, and its resulting decline (R). Like the one mouldy piece of fruit that corrupts the entire bowl, a relatively small number of senescent cells can persist and spread inflammation that can damage neighbouring cells (R).

The accumulation of senescent cells has been shown to drive aging and age-related diseases. The selective killing has been shown to improve health span (R). More on strategies on how to improve senolysis and the cellular clean up mechanisms in a future blog post!

Some of the conditions associated with excess cellular senescence include:

• Osteoporosis
• Frailty
• Cardiovascular disease
• Osteoarthritis
• Pulmonary fibrosis
• Renal disease
• Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease
• Hepatic steatosis
• Metabolic dysfunction (R)
• Decline in eye sight (R)

Autophagy = Self-eating

Autophagy is one of the very important biological processes involved in the cleaning up process. It literally means ‘self-eating’ (derived from the Greek auto, meaning ‘self’, and phagy, meaning ‘eat’). It is a natural, highly regulated, and essential mechanism in which cells break down, clean out, and recycle their own damaged or dysfunctional parts—such as old proteins and organelles—to repair themselves and function more efficiently.

Defective autophagy is linked to:

• Cardiovascular disease including
  • Atherosclerosis (R, R)
  • Vascular calcifications and injury (R, R)
  • Atrial fibrillation, cardiac hypertrophy, heart failure (R, R).
• Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are associated with abnormal protein aggregates and a malfunctioning of the ‘waste product removal’ of autophagy (R, R)
• PCOS (PolyCystic Ovarian Syndrome) and poor quality eggs (R, R)
• Endometriosis (a condition where endometrial tissue grows outside the uterus, contributing to often debilitating pains, difficulties conceiving, and more) (R)
• Immune escape. Autophagy helps to eliminate invaders via ‘xenophagy’ and thereby helps prevent infections (R, R).

However, as with so many other processes and substances in the body, more of a good thing doesn’t always mean better. Autophagy is yet another example. It acts as a double-edged sword in cancer. While it functions as a tumour-suppressive mechanism during the early stages of cancer development, but acts as a pro-tumorigenic, protective mechanism for established, late-stage tumours (R).

Stem cells

Stem cells are ‘master cells’ capable of self-renewal and turning into specialized cell types to repair, replace, and regenerate damaged tissues. They are crucial to health span by maintaining tissue function, healing injuries, and combatting aging.

However, they decline over time due to damaging intrinsic and extrinsic environmental factors. This decline contributes to frailty, aging, and reduced health span (R).

‘MOT’s’ on a systemic level

The lymphatic system = Your body’s waste drainage network

The lymphatic system is our body’s drainage network. It is composed of vessels that run throughout the entire body, much like our arteries and veins, in addition to nodes and organs like the spleen and thymus, transporting a colourless fluid called lymph back into the bloodstream.

Traditionally it has been understood primarily involving fluid transport and immune surveillance, removing waste and toxins including lipoprotein-cholesterol from atherosclerotic plaques (R), fighting infections, and helping to maintain fluid balance. However, recent studies have revealed the lymphatics play a larger role by sending signals, maintaining tissue health, and facilitating regeneration (R), hence supporting health span and a smooth running of our ‘cogwheel machinery of health’.

When this system becomes sluggish and stagnant, ‘sludge’ and ‘rust’ start to build up, contributing to ‘inflammaging’ and decline.

Some of the obvious signs of lymphatic congestion:

• Swelling, including in the limbs, but also around the eyes and in the face
• Cellulite
• Bloating
• Heavy limbs
• Stiffness

Yet impaired lymphatic drainage contributes to more insidious, harder to pinpoint conditions too:

• Interstitial inflammatory stasis contributing to pain, stiffness, neuroinflammation and ‘inflammaging’ (R)
• Bone loss and fracture risk (R)
• Muscular dystrophy (R)
• Exacerbates the damage associated with arthritis
• Atherosclerotic plaque progression and reduced cardiovascular health (R)
• Osteoarthritis (R)
• Histamine intolerance
• Inflammatory bowel disease and IBS (R)

Women are disproportionately affected by lymphatic stagnation, likely due to hormonal factors influencing lymphatic vessels (R).

The glymphatic system

Not quite the same as the lymphatic system, as comprised of different cells, yet this system also mediates waste removal, in this case from the brain.

Preclinical studies indicate that dysfunction of the glymphatic system contributes to the development of neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, small-vessel cerebrovascular disease, traumatic brain injury.

For example in Alzheimer’s disease, impaired function of the glymphatic system may diminish waste clearance and thereby allow accumulation of toxic protein aggregates that should have been cleared (R).

Liver, bile and kidney – our intrinsic detox mechanisms

Does the word ‘detox’ leave a bitter taste in your mouth? Making you think of juice fasts, fad diets, and other whoo whoo schemes?

Bear with me here. While the word ‘detox’ has become one with the just mentioned strategies, our bodies do need to get rid of accumulated toxins, whether they be from the outside (ie environmental pollutants, drugs) or produced internally (breakdown products of our metabolism, hormones, cellular processes, cholesterol, and more), yet in a way you might not quite be familiar with. We in fact have wonderful intrinsic detox mechanisms, in particular our liver and kidneys.

Our liver is the master detox organ, breaking down toxins via a range of processes (phase 1 and phase 2 detox), turning them into a version ready to be excreted. In comes bile, which acts like our garbage disposal trucks and transports them into the gut, to be disposed of via the stool.

However, not all toxins are disposed of via bile and feces. Some, after being neutralised by the liver, are released back into the stream and transported to the kidneys. The kidneys acts like a filter and excrete some of them into the urine for disposal.

In addition, yet to much smaller amounts, some of these compounds can be expelled via breathing and sweat.

It doesn’t require much imagination to picture if these processes slag, sludge builds up.

Some obvious signs of an overwhelmed detox machinery include:

• Dark circles under the eyes
• Yellowing of the skin and eyes
• Hormonal breakdown concerns such as PMS, tender breasts and fibroids in women, ‘man boobs’ in men (often signs of ‘estrogen dominance’)
• Persistent fatigue
• Nausea
• Eczema
• High cholesterol
• Gallstones and a ‘sluggish bile’

As in the previous sections however, even without the presentation of these obvious signs, the accumulating ‘sludge’ and ‘rust’ contributes to a slow decline of the ‘cogwheel machinery of health’, and over years and decades, to the slow erosion of health.

All sounds doom and gloom? Don’t despair, we are just getting started. In future posts we will look at the factors messing with our waste removal and regeneration capacities, and dive into simple yet powerful dietary, lifestyle and supplement strategies you can start implementing right away to kickstart these pathways and assist your body’s health span – for life. Giving you the tools to become the CEO of your health trajectory, to look and feel better, for longer.