It has become a popular topic to find ways to slow down aging or to stop it completely. Recently studies have shown how your diet could have effects on how fast you age or the way you age. A study done by researchers at Penn State have identified that a person’s telomeres were affected by caloric restriction. Over a human lifetime, as their cells replicate, the copy of chromosomes will cause the shortening in the telomeres. The shortening of telomeres causes the chromosome to become damaged and prevent replication. This study tested how restricting calories may alter the telomere length. Researchers used 175 participants and data from the start of CALERIE study - the first randomized clinical trial of calorie restriction in humans, and continued for the next 24 months on a caloric restriction. Two-thirds of the participants participated in the caloric restriction while the remaining were used as a control group. In the first year of the caloric restriction participants lost telomere rapidly as well as weight compared to the control group but in the second year their weight stabilized and the loss of telomeres became slower than the control groups’. At the end of the two years the telomere length between participants and the control group were not significantly different. In a different study which was funded by the National Institute on Aging, ran a phase 2 trial for two years where 220 adults were randomized and part of the participants cut their caloric intake by as much as 25% — 500 calories for people who generally consume 2,000 calories a day. Through this researchers found that people who cut their calories slowed the pace of their aging by 2% to 3%, compared to people who were on a normal diet.
Very interesting study! I wonder how certain variables affected their results such as the participants physical activity (would effect caloric expenditure), and body size/weight (would effect necessary daily caloric intake).
ReplyDeleteThe idea that what you eat and how you eat can effect you on a genetic level is crazy to think about. It be interesting to see if certain foods were restricted more than others and if that had an effect on the results of the studies. I would also like to see if theres variation between different forms of diet restriction like eats smaller portions regularly vs intermittent fasting.
ReplyDeleteI think this study is very interesting, I would love to find out more information about slowing down the aging process using food. Interested in finding out if the participants altered the quality of the food they were consuming or made other lifestyles changes during this experiment.
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