Cellular Compound May Increase Lifespan Without the Need For Strict Dieting 66
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Every day, our cells manufacture small amounts of a molecule that, in higher doses, might be the key to leading a longer, healthier life. A team of researchers has found that this molecule boosts the lifespan of worms by more than 50%, raising the possibility that it will increase human longevity. Dietary supplements that contain the molecule and allegedly build muscle are already on the market. The study drops a barbell on their use, however, by suggesting that the molecule may actually thwart muscle growth."
which (Score:5, Interesting)
which dietary supplements contain the molecule?
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Marketed to bodybuilders as 'Creatine Alpha-Ketoglutarate'. Just google for it.
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which dietary supplements contain the molecule?
Spam.
It's what Slashdot serves and what you crave.
Leto (Score:2)
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These are definitely not the worms you are looking for.
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Well, most slashdotters look kinda like Jabba already...
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They hit the jackpot with the first molecule they tried
you know almost for sure that this is one of those rush-to-publish-first articles that will be retracted in a few years. That is, you're still better off just living a healthy lifestyle. And believe me, the elixir of life won't be discovered anytime soon and even when discovered won't be available to the likes of you.
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TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
-ketoglutarate (-KG), an intermediate in a metabolic cycle that helps a cell extract energy from food -how hard is it to put a little more information in the summary?
oh right, this is about clickbait, not information...
This is as bad as the local news 'Tune in tonight to find out which foods could kill you'.....
-I'm just sayin'
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Re:TFA (Score:4, Informative)
No. The objective is to keep everyone interested so that they can observe the advertising.
Depending on locale, there may be easy answers to this problem: NPR, PBS, BBC, CBC, [et cetera].
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Don't forget Pacifica, and they are on the web and have a nice iOS app.
Worms are a poor model (Score:5, Interesting)
Humans live insanely long lives for mammals: twice the average. The average mammal lives a billion heartbeats, humans live two billion. "Heartbeats" are a convenient normalization that accounts pretty well for differences in size, etc.
There are fairly plausible evolutionary reasons for this. Grandparents are the primary mechanism by which culture is transmitted, so if your grandparents (or the grandparents of your close kin) lived a long time you would have a better chance of reproducing yourself, assuming cultural knowledge is useful in your local environment. And people with long-lived grandparents tend to be long-lived themselves, so the trait gets selected for.
As such, animal models for human aging are extremely hard to come by, and ones as distant as worms are very unlikely to produce results that are generalizable to humans. This is why so many things cure cancer in rats but have no effect on humans: rats will get cancer from a dirty look, so their cancers tend to be relatively easy to knock over. Cancers that survive all the clever molecular tricks humans throw at them are much harder nuts to crack.
We don't even know if calorie restriction works in humans (not enough people have been starving themselves for long enough to tell) so this article is way, way out on a speculative limb. Good science, I'm sure, but the hook should be "Scientists learn something about metabolic control pathways" and not "You may live forever!"
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This would be an extraordinarily easy thing to data mine. The fact that no correlation has been found (even though people know other things about the children of older women, eg they are more likely to suffer from a number of conditions) leads me to believe there's no correlation.
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"We don't even know if calorie restriction works in humans "
we do, and it doesn't.
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What? Citation is needed here, and no, after looking through the primary google links what I have seen for calorie restriction more or less has meshed up with the basics behind these studies. What they did talk about failing in humans was that nifty molecule from grape skins that doesn't affect our species as well as mice and flatworms.
So besides a molecule specific study could you help us out here?
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Worms are a poor model (Score:5, Interesting)
The summary is bad because its a c&p of TOA summary which seems to be just a pulp piece on various ageing research topics. That's not what the original paper was about. The original paper in Nature was kinda cool in itself. Simple summary - Nematodes lasted 70% longer when fed a ton of ÃZ±-KG. Some new areas to be studied, but nothing much to see here.
Re:Worms are a poor model (Score:5, Interesting)
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Studies in worms don't DIRECTLY translate to humans, which is why medicine doesn't attempt to do so. You find something basic in worms, you next see if it is true for mice. Then finally you see if it's true in humans.
Incredibly, this is directly stated in TFA:
There’s no guarantee that -KG will have the same effects on aging in people as it has in worms. And before researchers can even address that issue, they’ll have to figure out if the compound also extends the lives of laboratory organisms such as flies and mice.
T
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You don't seem to understand what worms are useful for. They have specific uses, you're knocking them for not being useful for all types of research. That's like saying a hammer is useless because it can't fuse fiber optic cables very well.
You're using it wrong. I have these highly classified papers courtesy of an anonymous person with the initials "E.S." which shows how to use a hammer to fuse fiber optics just fine!
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yeah..."fairly plausible" reasons would have to include the creation of health science and maybe, you know, hospitals?
love em to death, but i don't see too many dolphin and bonobos building hospitals for their kin.
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With billions of people and many, many different kinds of diet, you'd think there'd be more than enough data to validate or falsify CR for humans. For example, prisoners fed near-starvation diets have not been observed to live an extra 50 years.
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The fact that life expectancy has, by some accounts, doubled in less than 150 years makes me doubt that we're seeing evolution in action in this case.
The advancement of medical science might have something to do with it...
Boosterspice!! (Score:2)
From the Jinx Institute of Knowledge, of course! http://larryniven.wikia.com/wi... [wikia.com]
Also, might be alpha-ketoglutarate
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-I'm just sayin'
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It was pasted as UTF-8 from your browser because that is what the page is served with. It was then slaughtered on insertion into the slashdot database because the database tables are *not* stored in UTF-8. This is a very old bug in the slashdot code that I assume is not being fixed due to [reasons].
Riiight (Score:2)
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1) Maybe, maybe not. Its a start to determine the mechanize. You need so sort of plausibility first.
2) irrelevant, and underline your lack of understanding of evolution and nature.
3) nature doesn't want anything. it does what it dos, and we tell it to fuck off, were going to hurtle people to the moon.
Don't anthropomorphise nature, she hates it:)
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nature doesn't want anything.
Yes it does. Plastic. [goodreads.com]
Re:Riiight (Score:4, Funny)
Don't anthropomorphise nature, he hates that.
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When you get done laughing at this, take a read of "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins if you dare to know more.
I cringe every day at the amount of strongly science educated people who ask questions and imply that nature has some "Master-plan" which of course smacks of intelligent design. Intelligent design is not science, Intelligent design is a 'thinly veiled' political attempt to prove that the bible and christian creation myth is the un-assailable, unquestionable truth and that science that point
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There appear to be serious survival advantages from having grandparents and such around to help with raising children and playing a general part in society. Healthy older people happen pretty commonly in even the most primative societies. What's unusual historically but often found in the present culture, is older people who become seriously unable to contribute to the lives of their descendents (or anyone else) and need massive resources, but still live for decades.
But,
A slightly easier way to diet to a longer life (Score:4, Interesting)
From TFA:
By studying the mitochondria from cow heart cells, the researchers found that -KG blocks ATP synthase, thus turning down the cell’s metabolism.
Funny. You know what happens when you turn a cell's metabolism? It burns few calories. If you don't reduce calorie intake you get fat and suffer from a variety of obesity related illness that might kill you earlier than if you had not started taking the medication.
So in exchange for a possibly longer life you get to eat little and do little. Surprise, surprise! That is just like Calorie Restriction, albeit without the consistency requirement. That means you might actually achieve some benefit for the sacrifice rather than making the sacrifice, not getting it quite right, and getting no benefit.
Still, this doesn't sound like the fountain of youth. More like a prolonged living death.
Re:A slightly easier way to diet to a longer life (Score:5, Informative)
Perfect health has always been the slowest possible way to die.
Unintended consequences (Score:5, Funny)
The Old Ways are the Good Ways (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot 101 (Score:1)
The problem with calorie restriction. (Score:2)
Foods-and-nutrition experts have known for decades that calorie restriction itself is a dead-end - and not for the reasons given so far in this article.
Turns out that, while calorie restriction does retard aging, it also retards the functionality of the immune system.
Calorie-restrict a rat in a lab, where it's protected from most pathogens, and it lives measurably longer and shows signs of aging later, in proportion. Calorie-restrict a rat exposed to an outdoor environment, and it dies young of disease.
Thi
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Foods-and-nutrition experts have known for decades that calorie restriction itself is a dead-end - and not for the reasons given so far in this article.
Turns out that, while calorie restriction does retard aging, it also retards the functionality of the immune system.
Since most humans now live in an environment which is much more shielded than what we evolved in, and evolution hasn't had time to catch up, it's plausible that a tradeoff like that might be worthwhile.
Great News (Score:1)
A team of researchers has found that this molecule boosts the lifespan of worms by more than 50%
That is great news for the leeches of our society.
Alpha ketoglutarate is produced in copious... (Score:3)
One weird trick to live longer. (Score:2)