14 DAY TRIAL // A long life is expected for Nicole Ritchie.
Many studies have revealed that low calorie intake can rise health and longevity.
A team led by Professor Stephen Spindler (University of California) has found that decreasing calorie intake later in life can still produce many of the health and longevity effects of life-long calorie reduction, including anti-cancer effects.
The team is looking for a novel screening technique to detect drugs that imitate this longevity effect.
"Right now, there are no authentic "anti-aging drugs" capable of extending the lifespan of healthy people. The technique we have developed allows us to screen a relatively large number of drugs in months rather than years. The hope is that these drugs will be able to extend the lifespan of healthy animals, and possibly, after further testing, healthy humans", said Spindler.
Previous work has revealed that mice can prolong their life with up to 40% when put on a low calorie but highly nutritious diet. Spindler's team is looking for drugs which can induce the same good health and longevity effects in the absence of a low calorie alimentation.
The team is looking for the gene expression patterns which are turned on by low calorie diets and drugs which imitate these effects.
They are interested on drugs provoking beneficial effects and slow aging, even when they are administered late in life.
One drug employed to treat diabetic patients induces many of the effects of a low calorie diet, but it is not known if healthy people experience the same benefits.
And there could be side effects of such a drug, especially when taken for a lifetime.
Aging favors cell damage and the appearance of cancer cells.
Drugs administered late in life could not stop these effects, but instead they could empower the organism to kick out damaged cells that may turn cancerous, and to enhance repairing in damaged cells like neurons and heart cells. Low calorie diets stimulate the body to remove and fix damaged cells.
With the aging, the intensity of these mechanisms decreases, but low calorie diets stimulate the body to re-synthesize and turn over more cells, keeping a young look and good health.
The team employed its screening method to look for drugs which cause pre-cancerous and cancerous cells to die and to replace them with new, healthy cells.
In low diets, the body is thought to do this naturally as the broken down cells could deliver their energy when the organism is starving.
The destroyed cells are made up with the next meal.
The whole number of ingested calories, rather than the food type, is crucial for the effects of low calorie diets.
Even so, vegetarians and fish eaters are known to live longer than red meat eaters, and, generally, more fruit and vegetables in the diet are connected to better health and longer life.