Fast Mimicking Diet 1 Starting With Yeast
March 05, 2018Fast Mimicking Diet 1: Starting with Yeast
References: Fabrizio Science 2001, Science Translational Med, JBC, PNAS, Genetics,
You've heard of fasting and how it encourages the body to live longer. Well, sort of. The problem is, you like to eat. And eating is critical to keeping you alive. Let's turn it around a little and come at it from a different way. Can we make the argument that we can identify the process by which changing patterns of food, including low calorie periods of time, turn on "good genes" and what are those "good genes"?
Turns out no one had looked at aging from that point of view prior to Valter Longo. He set out on his career with the premise that the way to explore healthy aging should be to identify and encourage the genetic processes by which we can build resiliency and healthy aging. He started with yeast because they live just a few days and all 6000 of their genes are known. It's easy to make mutations and delete a gene and see what happens.
Here is what he found. In yeast, if you take away all nutrients from them except water, they live twice as long. Hmmm. If you add back nutrients, one at a time, the only one that accelerates aging… the ONLY one, is sugar. It activates two genes called RAS and PKA and inactivates enzymes and factors tha protect against oxidation. Boom, there he was. He found a key pathway in the gene signaling pathway that caused aging. And when he came out with it, as the basis of his PhD thesis, it was so new and so far ahead, no one would believe how a lowly graduate student could come up with such a significant finding, and he was ignored and avoided.
He teamed up with folks looking at more complicated organisms, worms, and found much the same but to jump from yeast to humans was too big a paradigm shift for folks to believe, and thereby publish his data. It took 6 years for him to get published in Science, and another eight years to get a study on humans showing how down regulating the human growth hormone gene helped humans live longer Sci Trans Med would be published.
He discovered that dwarf yeast and mice lived 2-6 times longer, so he sought out populations of dwarf humans in Ecuador, the Laron Syndrome folks, who are tiny dwarfs that smoke, drink, eat fried food and don't get any diseases of aging like diabetes and heart disease. Studying that population found that their defect in their growth hormone gene forced their body to go into constant regeneration mode. Studies of their brains showed that their brains were much younger in function than the rest of their bodies. That was the key. Regeneration mode. What on earth was going on? He suddenly found his ideas being accepted. Even the Pope wanted in, and he took some of his Laron buddies off to Rome to review his finding.
Starting with that research, Longo noted that aging is the risk factor that is common to all disease. The older you get, the higher your chances of getting……..you name it, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's. Hence, start with that problem. Reduce the aging pathway and those diseases will take care of themselves. That's why the Laron stayed "healthy", despite all their bad habits.
So, can we duplicate that by changing the way we eat? Yup. What is the simplified version that we can understand? Easy. There are two pathways that appear to accelerate aging. The Sugar pathwy turns on RAS-PKA and extra protein turns on TOR-6SK Growth Hormone Pathway. If you can down regulate the RAS-PKA pathway, you get autophagy - you gobble up old dead stuff and get rid of it. TOR-6SK is a critical monitor of nutrient density and controller of cell growth. Dial TOR down and cells stop dividing and go into hunker down mode. Alter those two pathways and presto, chango, you have gotten to the root cause of aging in humans. That discovery, that these two pathways are fundamental to all life on this planet, starting with yeast and moving all the way up to humans, is Longo's key contribution to modern understanding of aging. How can you alter those two? Next week.
www.What will work for me. I'm enthralled with the beauty of creation. From yeast up to humans, we can follow the same biological processes down at the cellular level, and then follow them up through all biology. The Laron People have a terrible mutation in that they end up being only 3-4 feet tall, and then live to 90 with no diseases. And all of this is connected to how we eat. Next week.
Pop Quiz
- If you feed yeast one food, they die much faster. What is it? Answer: sugar
- The one process that makes years live twice as long is? Answer: feed them nothing but water.
- Who are those people in Ecuador that live to be 90 with no diseases, despite eating fried food and smoking like chimneys? Answer: The Laron who have a defect in growth home production - and end up 4 feet tall.
- What two pathways do we share with yeast, and mice, and worms, and snakes, and monkeys and everything in between? Answer: TOR and RAS
- What do TOR and RAS do (BONUS POINTS)? Answer: RAS measures nutrients and turns of housecleaning when there aren't any. TOR measures nutrient density and turns on "hunker-down" mode when there is little.