Slashdot Mirror
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.
Now I can live longer and get a flat stomach by following ONE simple rule.
RTFA indeed, if you read as far as the third paragraph you'd know that it was also proven on mice, dogs, and baboons. That makes this pretty likely to apply to humans as well. Though I'm confused as to why the summary says that tryptophan also has this property, as the article doesn't even use the word. I couldn't find the original Nature article, but the linked one certainly said nothing about it.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.