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Reducing One Amino Acid Could Increase Lifespan
John Bryson writes "Eating less of one amino acid might lengthen your life. There have been lots of previous studies showing that many species live long on highly restricted calories, but a lot of this benefit may be possible by only restricting one amino acid. Amino acids that have shown this have been tryptophan and methionine. A recent study, published online December 2 in Nature, a highly respected journal, may help explain some of the health benefits of restricted-calorie diets."
how do you screen for one amino acid that may keep popping up in a hundred different foodstuff in various amounts? Unless you took a daily dose of something to chelate out that one a.a. from the body. Hmm....
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Tryptophan, isn't that the sleep inducing post Thanksgiving Feast drug of the ritual Turkey meal?
What's methionine found in? Don't tell me, pumpkin Pie...
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You don't have to eat your greens anymore, go straight to dessert!
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
This study may be especially significant for those employed in the nocturnal carnal need satisfaction industry, especially around holiday seasons. It might be the season to be jolly, but think of your health!
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Well, I guess it wouldn't be too bad if you lived in an Apple.
Now I can live longer and get a flat stomach by following ONE simple rule.
So the conclusion from this study is that people with caloric restriction lifestyles should consider eat more methionine containing foods to regain their mojo. Those of us on regular diets should cut intake of meat, seeds, and other foods that are high in methionine.
Tryptophan is a major precursor to Serotonin. High tryptophan levels correlate quite strongly with high Serotonin levels,...
> Amino acids that have shown this have been tryptophan
couldn't they have told us this before thanksgivig?
Couldn't they have told me this one week before I OD'd on tryptophan, not one week after?
Live long, have lots of sex without worrying about giving babies? By jove! Where can I send my money to?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08619.html for the actual study
So... what they discovered is that limiting diets reduce reproduction at the expense of lifespan?
Color me skeptical, but this is not exactly new. It's well known that limited diets reduce reproductive metabolism in favor of survival. After all, what good is reproduction if you don't live to do it.
Now, I'm not saying this is all bunk. I don't know. What I am saying is that all this really proves is that methionine is necessary for egg-laying and lifespan in Drosophila. That's a far stretch from saying that reducing methionine increases lifespan in well-fed humans. In fact, what TFA says is that there is a discrepancy in studies. In fact, TFA doesn't even mention tryptophan, so I don't know where the submitter got that.
Unfortunately, I can't access the Nature article right now. However, I'll definitely be taking a look at it tomorrow, because I am extremely skeptical of these claims.
I am on calorie restriction diet for 8 years now. First, this information has made me very upset. Second, I do not believe this !!
As a subscriber to Nature I find it interesting that when we're talking about amino acids Nature is a highly respected international weekly journal of science but.... when we're talking climate science it's the nexus of an evil, duplicitous, Socialist, Marxist, environmentalist cabal bent on destroying the fabric of American society.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
TFA: "“The idea that only calories are important is basically falling apart,” Fontana says."
Perhaps one should consider that in complex systems there is no such thing like 'only'.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I am the one slashdotter that reads TFA (the full article) before posting. I even did a search for tryptophan. Nope, it's not there. Maybe the submitter forgot a link, but tryptophan is never mentioned in the sciencenews.org article.
If anything, TFA says that you should restrict all amino acids except methionine. If you are fruit fly, that is.
TFA also says nothing about tryptophan in particular.
Or am I totally confused?
The summary mentions tryptophan but it isn't anywhere in the article. And I wonder if the decreased longevity is due to the excessive methionine itself or a result of its byproducts such as SAM and homocysteine.
keep the herd in stock. Dont undo their experiments.
Like an admin on holiday, when they get back its personal.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If it's not one study condoning the intake of things like red meat because of known killers like heart disease (which shorten your life), and instead eat the "other" meat, such as fish, turkey, chicken, only to have *this* new study tell me I could live longer if I stay away from foods and specifically meats, such as fish and turkey, that contain amino acids that make me live less? Who are we kidding?
TFA does not mention it and Nature has a paywall, but it would be interesting to know if they supplemented cysteine in these experiments. Cysteine is the only amino acid capable of making disulfide bonds and is only classified as non-essential because it can be converted from methionine. Whether or not they supplemented cysteine may imply that the same benefits could result from reducing the activity of the met->cys pathway.
Well we all know nature has a liberal bias. ;-)
(sorry, couldn't help myself )
We all know how this goes. If it feels good, we do it. If it feels bad, we don't do it or we avoid whatever causes it. Salt? Good... what does it matter that too much causes health problems? Sugar? Good... what does it matter that...? You get the idea.
I don't know why anyone cares about this kind of information when the best thing you can do to lengthen your life is to do one thing really well:
Sit on your ass, don't get hit by a car, and get your all in 1 survival pill in 15 years.
Salt tastes good? Your tastes must differ completely from mine. I think it's a developed thing from many years of not eating salt with everything.
It's the same with meat. Basically, they will reinvent the auyrvedic foods. Different foods given to different bodytypes..
They're years behind though. A couple of thousands years =)
I, like many people, welcome the idea of living as long as I can be productive and maybe a bit beyond -- but I have no wish to live indefinitely if that life is one of immobility, pain, and humiliating dependence both physically and financially.
If this, or any, treatment results in an increased healthy lifespan by somehow allowing my body to repair itself as it did when I was in my twenties or even my early thirties then I'm I'm for it. Of course, that goes hand in hand with my ability and continued willingness to earn my keep within society. If, on the other hand, we're talking about a prolonged geriatric dependency and pain cycle than no. I am not interested in burdening my children and their children with my crotchety, miserable self for the bulk of their adult lives.
I'm 42 and while I try to stay in reasonable shape, working out pretty hard on both cardio/aerobics and strength/flexibility with Shotokan Karate two or three times a week, the difference in being over forty is profound in how much harder is is to avoid or recover from injury, to gain back lost strength or fitness, and all manner of other small health details that we completely ignore in our twenties and thirties.
So scientist friends; learn to restore the length of tolemeres if that's the magic, or how to rehydrate the collagen and cartilage that loose density and elasticity over time, or how to teach the rest of my organs and joints how to regenerate as my liver does. Learn to filter the toxins and free radicals that build up over decades and damage my dna, and to repair that dna that gets damaged by radiation and transcription errors. These things will extend my healthy lifespan and let me contribute to world with youthful energy, a quick mind, and extra decades of learning and wisdom. If we can do that for people, we'll make the worlds we live in better places.
The goal must be living better, longer; not just living longer.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"Doc, I wanna live to a healthy, ripe age."
"Hmm... do you drink?"
"Nah."
"Smoke?"
"Nope."
"Got frequently changing sexual contacts?"
"Not at all."
"Then why the heck do you want to get old?"
We're so afraid of dying that we don't live anymore. We're busy surviving. Personally, I guess I won't see the age of 60. But I'll do my best to have lived every single day 'til.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So what this essentially means is that we can choose between shorter lives and not wanting longer ones.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I saw this segment on cnn the other day http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2009/11/30/vs.clinic.immortality.cnn
The start codon for protein assembly - all proteins, everywhere - specifies that methionine is the first amino acid in the chain. And as someone else pointed out, Trp is a precursor for serotonin. These are two pretty important molecules, and toying with their ambient levels doesn't sound like such a great idea to me, the average idiot on the street.
By the way, there is one pill these days that can help a lot with life-extension for most US Americans. Vitamin D3 gelcaps 5000 IU, with this treatment protocol including blood testing:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Human lifespan in hunter-gather times past infant mortality might have been into the 60s or older.
The following is from something I wrote elsewhere:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.
As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."
Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
But, they miss the big picture of the phase change transition from pre-scarcity hunter-gatherers (like the Hmong or Iroquois in older times) to
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Salt? Good... what does it matter that too much causes health problems?
Thing about salt is one's taste for what a "normal" level of saltiness is can be changed without a massive amount of hassle. I tend not to normally add salt to my food- granted, there's often a lot still in it- and I find that I notice saltiness in commercially-made foods more.
If it requires a short period of finding less salt on your food slightly bland in order to prolong your life quite a bit, then it's worth it IMHO.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
From those damn Visitors, they want to be able to make us amino acid free food so they can tighten their stranglehold on us.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
And I just finished all the thanksgiving leftovers.
every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Benito_Mussolini
Just as the perennial question of 'nature or nurture' is a misstatement of how the world works (neither ever exist or act alone; results are due to the interactions of nature AND nurture) looking into this deeper will almost certainly delve into a wonderfully chaotic collection of interactions, interactions modified by others, interactions that change in strength nonlinearly as the variables change linearly, and more of the stuff that keeps us in income by preventing us on figuring anything out completely. The question won't be whether aminos or calories are more important, but under what conditions which aminos exert significant effects on calories (and vice versa), what second order/third variable interactions are significant, and so forth. I know this seems to fly in the face of parismony, what we call Occam's Razor, but that has to do with relative merits of answers, not questions. The questions are still hairy -- Willem of Ockham had no razor; he had a beard.
Take tryptophan. Precursor to dopamine. Itself precursor to norepinephrine and epinephrine. The last two are behaviorally activating, the former behaviorally inhibiting. One amino feeds two behavioral tendencies via three neurotransmitters and none of this can be pulled apart. More tryptophan would allow the body to make more of these if needed, but that's not often other than the low level continual need. But reduce tryptophan (but not calories, keeping things clean here) and below a crucial level the animal ceases to orient on salient stimuli (lack of dopamine; it can't stop to smell the roses, or Fruit Loops), including food, as well as slowing its spontaneous movement, meaning its random investigations will bring it in contact with less food, possibly including less variety. Also, lack of orienting means learning is inhibited, so later investigations will be more likely to go over ground already depleted. Further, with its activity slowed, food won't burn as fuel as much and go into fat storage more. It gets fat, so it gets slower, and all these conspire to create a downward spiral.
Now, that's just from understanding some of the products and giving one possible path. It's probably too simplistic too. Just because we can manipulate one variable and examine certain outcomes doesn't mean other things aren't involved as co-causal, co-result or co-operative.
Now throw individual differences into the mix. Some do well on low calorie diets. Some suffer. And vice is once again versa. Whatever the reasons, in this situation the organism will seek to reregulate. Also, some are better (more effective, effiecient, or both) at having enough neurotransmitter available for a given amount of precursor. Better creation, better conversion from one to another, less effective mechanisms for removing excess from use, more effective mechanisms for recycling transmitter components to produce more using less precursor, all of these are just a few of the many individual differences that might come into play. And then the array of those differences can change from changing the amount of food/precursor available.
Oh, and the recycling system for dopamine et al. also works on other transmitters like serotonin, so a neurotransmitter not affected directly by amino or calorie is affected by changing levels in those transmitters that are, and the availability or reregulation of the amount of recycling enzyme (MAO). You can't change one in vivo without affecting the whole system to some extent, while affecting some components more and others less.
No, it's going to take a lot deeper and wider inestigation to truly make sense of it. A simpler design may produce a result, but unless the design is inclusive, the results won't be generalizable.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
it's extremely unlikely that it's ... limitable in any meaningful way without genocidal levels of population reduction.
In general I recommend minimizing focus on consequence when considering the truth of a matter.
Fear or desire around consequence distorts judgement.
You could withhold lysine from the dinosaurs to keep them from reproducing.
But "life finds a way."
Anyone else read the title as speaking of a decrease of the oxidation state of an amino acid?
The American Revolution was caused by Taxation Without Representation. Look up the term sometime. The first thing the founding fathers did was enlarge government, and institute their own tax system.
After finding the nature.com abstract link from the Anonymous Coward posting, I searched for a random sentence from the abstract, quoted, in Google + pdf which is a good way to find warez fulltext. (Saves $32.)
From the fulltext, "In rodents, lifespan can be extended by restricting either methionine or tryptophan"
17 fluid ounces.
A 12 Oz can of soda is not nearly enough. Yet I tend to trail off and leave the last bit of a 20 oz bottle. The amount of a Venom drink seems perfect.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08619.html
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
TFA does not mention tryptophan at all. TFA says lifespan increase is due to reduced calorie diet. Methionine, says TFA, was added to the diet to reverse lost fertility. TFA says, "Long life may stem from a proper imbalance of dietary nutrients" It don't say shit about restricting any amino acids to live longer. It says add one to be able to reproduce. What I read says that reduced calorie diet with some yet unknown supplement mix of vitamins and amino acids could extend lifespan.