The kidneys often become bulky and dysfunctional in diabetes, and now scientists have found that one path to this damage dramatically reduces the kidney’s ability to clean up after itself.
The natural cleanup is called autophagy, which literally means “self-eating,” and it’s a constant throughout our bodies as debris, like misfolded proteins and damaged cell powerhouses called mitochondria, get packaged into a double-membrane sack, then destroyed by enzymes to help keep cells and organs functioning at a premium.
