Want to see 100? This amino acid could help
As everyone knows, women celebrities diet — often quite harshly — because they know that they will live longer if they restrict their caloric intake. Living longer means they can be more productive members of society. So selfless.
Starving yourself for humanity? It might not be how much you eat, but what you eat.
Well. Good news. Researchers think that starving might not extend lives.
They say that it’s the balance of a specific amino acid that one consumes — and not total calorie intake — that can make for longer or more fertile lives. The Institute of Healthy Ageing, in London, varied the amounts of vitamins, lipids and amino acids that they fed fruit flies, and learned that only the acids had an impact.
Reducing the amino acid methionine in a high-calorie diet extended lives (the same effect has been recorded in past studies of rodents). Methionine is found in abundance in fish, meat and sesame seeds.
Boosting methionine in low-calorie diets, on the other hand, boosted fertility without extending lifespan.
Playing with these variables, says Dr. Matthew Piper, one of the study’s authors, resulted in flies that lived longer and produced more offspring.
Yes, its fruit flies, but the principle is there. Here’s just a partial list of women sacrificing themselves today so that they can be with us longer. Think of all the Teak Rockets, Blue Bell Madonnas and Kal-Els we could welcome if methionine pans out.
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So interesting! Do you have any sense of whether the methionine had to be reduced a little, a lot, or eliminated completely? Only flies, I know, but still…I am partial to sesame bagels.
They cut the amino acid in a diet by half when they cut the flies’ diet from high-cal to low-cal. Then they reversed the formula — doubled the amino acid when they boosted diets from low-cal to high-cal.
Here’s what Dr. Matthew Piper from UCL says:
“They are maintained on a diet of yeast and sugar and we had previously found that the yeast component, not the calorie content, of the food is important in determining fly lifespan. These experiments were performed by making a 2-fold adjustment to the yeast content.
In this latest work, we have found that adjusting the amino acid content could reproduce the same effect as when adjusting yeast. Further experiments showed that this is due to methionine alone.
Although difficult to say for technical reasons, we infer that the effective methionine adjustment is by a similar proportion to that of the yeast component (ie reduced by half from high to low food, or doubled from low to high food).”
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] less, at least eating less of some foods, seems to prolong lives, but how? New research funded by the US Department of Agriculture indicates [...]