Many don’t even know what this word means, and it’s becoming increasingly popular in the world, Djokovic uses those mechanisms every day!

Novak Djokovic, Photo: EPA / Francis Malasig

Through the social network Instagram, Novak Djokovic is promoting his way of life, and the best tennis player in the world has had interesting guests in recent weeks.

Yesterday, Dragan Ivanova, a specialist in internal medicine and professor at the Novi Sad Faculty of Teacher Education, welcomed him.

The two talked about nutrition, and Djokovic mentioned that he hasn’t eaten food for 16 hours in the past year and a half.

It is autophagy, a mechanism that is a regulated natural destructive mechanism during which unnecessary or non-functional cellular components are broken down.

This mechanism helps the body to eliminate damaged, unusable and malignant cells because they can indicate inflammatory reactions or some very serious diseases.

Novak Djokovic, Photo: EPA-EFE / FRANCIS MALASIG

The literal translation of this word would be “eat yourself,” and cells use autophagy to remove damaged proteins and organelles, thereby suppressing the negative effects of aging on the body.

Many people practice autophagy to be “fashionable”, it can be harmful and is not intended for everyone.

Not all athletes use these methods for their bodies. For autophagy research, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Osumi won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2016!