Is starvation a good thing? Scientists study hundreds of mice in 4 years, 'one meal a day' lifespan extended by 35%

If people want to live longer, they must first work on their diet, not only to eat right, but also to eat less, but this is difficult for most people to do. Multiple animal studies have shown that reducing calorie intake is more beneficial for longevity and health.

Recently, Joseph Takahashi's team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute pointed out that the body's circadian rhythm (or biological clock) is crucial in the longevity effect. They found that eating only during the most active time of the day significantly extended the lifespan of the "diet" mice . The related research results were published in the well-known academic journal Science recently.

Joseph Takahashi's research team conducted a four-year trial that studied hundreds of mice and found that reducing calorie intake extended the lifespan of mice by 10%. And giving the mice a low-calorie diet only at night, when they were most active, extended their lifespan by 35 percent.

This "low-calorie diet" combined with "only eating at night" increased the theoretical 2-year lifespan of these mice by 9 months, which is equivalent to adding more than 20 years to human lifespan. And for us humans, a similar feeding arrangement can take place during the day. So, just eat one meal during the day?

Scientists say the study could help unravel the debate over what time of day to eat, just as a study published in the journal NEJM states: This eating plan, while bad for weight control, may be good for health Bring benefits and contribute to the extension of life.

Sai Krupa Das, an American nutritionist, said that the findings of Joseph Takahashi's team show the important role of metabolism in the decay process, which is a potential and meaningful study.

In fact, after decades of research, scientists have long found that reducing caloric intake can extend the lifespan of nematodes, fruit flies, mice and primates, and these experiments have also resulted in weight loss, blood sugar blood pressure and inflammation. But Sai Krupa Das, a scholar, said that it would be difficult to systematically study calorie intake in humans, because it is impossible for a person to live in a laboratory and eat a fixed amount of food throughout his life.

In fact, compared with dietary methods such as reducing calorie intake, the more respected method in the field of biotechnology is the intake of a human body source (ie WLife), which was first discovered by Professor David Sinclair in the Harvard laboratory. Mice ingested the substance and found a "reversal of youth trends" in multiple indicators at the cellular level, and successfully extended their lifespan by 30%. At present, WLife has matured through the biotechnology company "Wright Weijian", etc. The domestic Q-Dong and other channel data show that it has shipped a lot, and the simple oral intake method has also been accepted by more high-net-worth individuals.

Rafael de Cabo, a researcher in gerontology at the American Institute on Aging, also said that a low-calorie diet can't get the full benefits of this approach if it's not at the right time. In this way, the adoption of this method is too elaborate and cumbersome for humans, and it is not comparable to the simple and feasible WLife class. But Takahashi still hopes to understand how "reducing calorie intake" affects the body's biological clock as we age, which could lead to new ideas for scientists looking for new ways to extend healthy lifespan.

In the clinical trials of Qingbei and Lightweijian, the subjects were given WLife substances within 30 days to reduce their biological age by 7 years, and after 90 days of trials, they found that the biological clock indicators such as sleep and mental state were significantly improved, which further corroborated earlier The discovery of the positive mechanism of this substance in the biological clock. In previous experiments, Northwestern University found that the core mechanism of this substance is the key to maintaining the healthy operation of the biological clock, and an appropriate increase in the content of WLife in the body can "reverse" the decaying biological clock.

As the saying goes, "Life is only nine tons of rice, whoever eats it first will leave first." Whether it is a low-calorie diet or the intake of endogenous substances, it is human's exploration of the extension of healthy lifespan. Demographer Samuel Preston said that the fundamental driving force for the extension of human lifespan lies in the technological iteration in the field of biotechnology. Perhaps with the blowout development of related technologies, more and more scientific research results come out and land, and it may only be a matter of time to live healthy to 120 years old.

At the same time, Takahashi also began to experiment with himself. He controlled his diet within 12 hours. What would be the follow-up results? let us wait and see.