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Free Radicals May Not Be Cause of Aging
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have uncovered strong new evidence that that wildly-accepted mitochondrial free radical theory of aging (MFRTA) is wrong. MFRTA suggests that free radicals cause oxidative damage, which in turn leads to the aging process. This new evidence shows that high levels of Reactive Oxidative species are rather a biological signal used to combat aging then the process itself. This goes against claims of major health benefits from consuming foods and particularly supplements that contain antioxidants."
Jailing the radicals was good?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If free radicals were responsible for (a large part) of aging then blueberry farmers would routinely live to be more than 100. Blueberries supposedly have the highest amount of anti-oxidants (by weight? volume? serving size?) of any food.
Too bad, I love blueberries.
Ya, scientists, pshaw. They're so full of it!
This is why we need to institute mandatory human experimentation!
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
With your asbestos example, I think the connection is pretty clear, the anti-aging connection was assumed in the case of anti-oxidants, with (apparently) little effort to investigate to confirm the hypothesis.
I never did really understand the claims for anti-oxidants, it was always a vague argument from anti-oxidant proponents and food product packages. I'm sure they're good, but when people just go overboard on anything, it's usually not a good thing.
More generally, scientists should not confuse cause and effect. Or even more generally: correlation for causation. That's just bad science.
And yet, it seems to be rather prevalent. Especially in the questionable science of nutrition, where any slightly new idea can lead to a fortune in book sales, diet plans, drug development, etc.
i took the exact opposite strategy decades ago and became, for want of a better word, Godlike. I smell great too. (that's what all the gorgeous women tell me anyway)
look sig is kool
A lot of proteins in these worms really are, but still, it's insane to jump at these conclusions so quickly...
The article here also has a link to a paper of him from 2009 which seems to be about mice, but then again it's in a low-impact-factor journal. Since his findings would be of great interest for a broad audience this might be a sign of shabby/incomplete research (interesting enough for a big paper but not good enough)...
Can't say more before I'm on a computer with access to the journal to actually read it though.
If ANY diet made you live significantly longer we'd have noticed by now.
Same goes for exercise regimes, eg. If running five miles a day made you live longer we'd have noticed.
We can point to plenty of things that make your life shorter, eg. smoking, eating nothing but junk food, but I'm fairly sure that if you're living a reasonable lifestyle then genetics completely dominates. After that it's probably as much down to happiness as anything else.
No sig today...
I completely understand vegetarian and vegan philosophy, although I'm not interested in participating. But I have noticed the same thing, that all the vegetarians I know are all pasty white and sickly looking, although there are obviously exceptions. Not sure if that is because of the lack of meat, or if just pasty and sickly people are more likely to give up meat. I won't eat veal, and *hate* the way we currently raise animals for meat, but I'm pretty sure we evolved to eat critters. They're tasty, too.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Free radicals don't cause aging, staring at Perl code does. Drives you to drink and makes you lose hair, too.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
As shown by this research: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101128/full/news.2010.635.html
Rather straightforward, isn't it? Why *does* a cell die, anyway? As long as it can grow and replicate, it shouldn't. Except for the telomere TTL-signal. Once we intervene in that, I think aging could be reduced or slowed drastically. I doubt there is much risk of cancer: cancer is when cells don't respond to normal apoptosis signals and keep growing. While removing the TTL-signal could be risky, I'm confident that cells with only the Time To Live removed could still respond normally to other signals. And while cancer *may* be lethal, aging is *always* lethal.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Oh yeah? Well I started being eaten, and became...well it actually kind of sucks. Also I am typing this with my elbow stubs.
Your brain is not a computer.
You first, tell us how it goes.
Sounds like a disciple of the well-known crackpot Weston Price.
Well it would be a solution to the politician, banker and lobbyist problem in this country.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
If vegetables are good for your health it does not mean meat is bad.
I eat both neat and vegetables, when people try to guess my age they normally undershoot by ten to fifteen years.
What makes a theory "wildly accepted"? Does it mean there are a bunch of scientists who gather spontaneously at impromptu bonfires and ululate their heathen belief in a carnal fashion?
I mean, how can anything with the word free right there as part of it's name be bad for you?
Free Hat!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
But organic is the way to go! If it's natural, it's good for you
Why do so many people think this is the case? That something manufactured is "not as good" as something natural. I'm sure there are as many cases where this is true as there are where this is false. Yet look at how organic foods have been taking off... I'd rather eat food that was kept bug-free by pesticides, and used fertilizer to make the plants grow to their maximum extent, and had preservatives added to keep the fruit at its tip-top freshness. (I know some organic food companies just add "organic" as a label that doesn't mean anything, but most organic producers follow some (if not all) of those rules.) Oh well... I guess people can eat what they choose, no matter what their rationale may be.
Haven't you noticed how people not so many years agou used to look quite old and frail already in their sixties, but now we are no longer surprised to find that people in their seventies are still physically active and mentally alert?
Yes. Then I realize that old people haven't changed... When I was 10, people in their 40s looked aged, people in their 60s looked very old and frail, and people in their 80s looked like something from a horror movie.
Now that I'm in my 30s, I find people in their 40s don't look so old. And people in their 60s don't look all that much different with the exception of some white/grey hair and a few more blemishes on their skin.
Normally, cholesterol intake does not correspond to serum cholesterol in any case, since your liver makes up the difference. It's not really something to worry about.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
I dunno about most people, but I'll buy organic sometimes because it's usually indicative of a more sustainable farming process. I couldn't care less about the "all natural" part, but I do care about promoting intelligent usage of the (limited) resources on the planet.
Then again I'll be dead before it becomes a problem so what do I care.
[citation needed]
Seriously, you can't just spout something like that and expect us to take your word for it. Is even a single link too much work?
It would be a less tenable position if the makers of processed food bothered at all to produce healthy products. Try to buy a box of crackers that hasn't had all the soluble fiber removed. You've got like two choices, and they both cost more than the products next to them which likely took more effort to refine.
Personally I'd feel safer strolling down a supermarket drug aisle and popping a random pill than I would walking into the woods and eating a random mushroom. At the same time, I wouldn't trust the research lab telling me the corn-that-produces-its-own-pesticide is just fine for me farther than I could throw the CEOs lexus.
Take a look at the crap nutritional value presented by the refined products, and the amount of corruption of science when it comes to analyzing health effects of some company's latest brainchild, and it leaves plenty of toehold for the "natural is good" meme to take root. If the research was not so clouded by money, and wasn't done almost exclusively on corporate patent-babies, people would be less likely to believe the crap they read on the food supplement sites.
In the end it all comes down to trust, and the ability to verify that trust.
Someone had to do it.
'If you ask most people on the street what causes aging, many would say free radicals, but it's a complex story.'
—Dr. Siegfried Hekimi, McGill University
I'm pretty sure if you asked most people on the street what causes aging, a handful would say free radicals, while most would say time or God. Then if you followed up by asking them, "Don't you think it could be free radicals?" their answer would be "WTF are free radicals?"
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
most organic producers follow some (if not all) of those rules.)
Nope, they don't.
Organic doesn't mean grown without fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, or preservatives. Not at all. All fruits and vegetables are grown with all three in the process.
The only difference is that the fertilizer, instead of being processed, enhanced, guaranteed free of disease, or synthesized, is all-natural manure, with all the possible contaminants contained within. The pesticides are all-natural, 100 year old recipes, with all of their possible health-effects and negative environmental impact that have been weeded out of modern, synthetic pesticides. The preservatives are, again, all natural, with all of the health issues and contaminant issues and, well, preservation issues, that modern preservatives are always striving to eliminate.
Organic food is almost all grown the exact same was as regular food: on large, industrial farms, in large volumes, for a profit. The only difference is that the expense of Organic food comes from the limited supply (due to demand as well as a higher rate of spoilage), while the expense of normal food comes from making it better, cheaper, and safer.
One thing that should be pointed out is that this article is in the January 2010 issue, and was initially published online in September 2009, so this isn't breaking news, though it looks like research may have continued in the same lab following this paper- there's no reference t paraquat in the paper, for instance. Another, which is touched on in the news article is that the scientists involved do not dispute that reactive oxygen species can have deleterious effects on living organisms- just that aging is not a process of mitochondria being injured by ROS. Their conclusion spells it out:
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
You are free to attempt to bring healthy crackers to the market.
Yes, and he's free to criticise makers of existing products whether he wants to compete with them or not.
When they don't sell, or they spoil on the shelves, then you'll understand why the industry is the way it is.
That doesn't mean that the industry isn't producing crap.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
80+ isn't very old for humans (in fact it's the average in many countries these days...)
A miracle diet for humans would have to do a lot better than that. eg. Calorie restriction in mice makes them live twice as long.
Even a 25% increase in human lifespan would mean people could make it to 150 but that's simply not happening. Not with any known diet or lifestyle.
Given the vast range of lifestyles/diets all over the world you'd think we'd be able to measure something if diets/lifestyles really made much of a difference.
There's no shortage of people looking for a miracle diet/lifestyle so I'm sticking with Occam's razor for now.
No sig today...
Not true at all. Saturated fats don't cause heart attacks,
Seriously? The link between increased saturated fat consumption and increased risk of coronary disease is one of the most well-established findings of modern dietary science.
there aren't any studies that show otherwise.
Just to start. It's only page one and over half of them show statistically significant links. You can say there are new studies that cast doubt on these results, or you can say there are methodological problems with these studies that make their results less valid, but to claim there aren't any studies showing the link is both false and irresponsible.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
You don't need to remove the TTL, just reset it every fifty years or so.
A drug that restores the telomeres in each cell could be applied when needed, and then the telomeres would be shortened again at each cell division in the normal way.
There exists such a chemical, it's an enzyme it's called telomerase and it is actually active in a significant proportion of cells in the body. Either way the situation is far more nucanced than just the telomeres.
Glad to know that primitive peoples who don't use those kinds of oils are so healthy and age so well...
FYI, coconut oil is not totally saturated (IV 14 or so). Even in its ultrahardened (by hydrogenation) form, it can still undergo oxidative breakdown and form peroxides in one of the early steps. It admittedly does so at a slower rate than highly unsaturated oils.
How do I know? I worked in a quality control lab that measured the iodine value (a measure of saturation) and the peroxide value (a measure of oxidative deterioration) in coconut oils among many others.
Both butterfat (IV 30 or so) and lamb fat (IV also around 30) are not completely saturated. They also undergo oxidative decay of this sort.
Essentially no natural source oil is completely saturated. The only ones I've seen that were have been chemically prepared synthetics (Captex 300 comes to mind)
FYI number 2: The coconut oil is deodorized as well. It also is sometimes hardened with hydrogenation depending on the application.
My facility was set up for kosher processing and we didn't do animal based oils. But many processed animal fats are also deodorized with high temperature steam just like plant oils.
There are a whole range of other questionable things in your post beyond the lack of knowledge of oil chemistry.
There are many well known reasons for accelerated aging of skin in some people. Over exposure to sun. Smoking. Genetics, etc.
Organic farming uses organic pesticides and preservatives.
Organic food is almost all grown the exact same was as regular food: on large, industrial farms, in large volumes, for a profit. The only difference is that the expense of Organic food comes from the limited supply (due to demand as well as a higher rate of spoilage), while the expense of normal food comes from making it better, cheaper, and safer.
Are you trolling, or just ignorant? Most people don't know what organic food is, but if you're going to make an argument about it, why not educate yourself on the subject first rather than just spout your own prejudices for everyone on the internet to read?
Food quality has been on a steady decline. Poisons and hormone-mimickers in food are steadily going up while nutrients like minerals and vitamins are going down. Read the studies about it and wonder why this is so, all while buying cheaper food in larger quantities. The long list doesn't end there however, the earth itself is being drained of nutrients due to unhealthy mono-culture and non-stop farming each and every year. For many farmers, this is more important, so there is a big shift today to organic farming, just because of the higher sustainable development factor. If we destroy the earth, famine is not too far away. If we destroy nature or cut outself out from it too much, we may have to turn to genetic engineering to be able to sustain healthy bodies, always fighting new unknown diseases, not a very pleasant prospect except for the medical industry.
Organic farming can be many different ways, with the more extreme end being biodynamic farming. It is true that you can have large farms producing roughly the same yield as "modern farms", at least if you compare nutrients. Many people have the opinion that you can eat less of organic foods, and still feel satiated. So less yield does not necessarily mean less food.
This clockwork-universe mentality that everything to food and life is about proteins, minerals, vitamins, and this obsession of getting rid of dirt and bugs, is well, an hypothesis without basis in nature. Many people believe that there is more to food than what we can measure in its quantities. Life is certainly about more than its parts. If you lack this understanding, you've been living in the city for too long. It's clouding your judgement, so time to take a break off media and city, find some new fresh perspectives in nature.
Why Organic? (Quite interesting introduction)
http://journeytoforever.org/garden_organic.html
Top 10 Reasons for Organic Farming (Showing that the soil and environment is given more importance)
http://www.organic.org/articles/showarticle/article-206
Btw, IANAF (I Am Not A Farmer), however, I know there is alot to organic farming and sustainable development, than our prejudices. Currently living outside major cities, and it does bring a different perspective to life than endless visits to cafes and caffe lattes.
Before you condemn something, at least give it a fair shot first, hmm?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Funny, being vegetarian and looking at others, seeing how old they look, I'm more inclined to believe it has more to do with genes. I believe there is a clockwork in our body, making us older, by programming rather than something that has to happen. I believe there are drugs you can take to supposedly "slow the aging process", but it's not been proven yet.
Especially when thinking about the massive amounts of Cola and candies I've consumed ;-)
Anecdotes, anecdotes..
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I'd love to see how you would create a double blind trial on this
Sure.
http://web.mit.edu/~sdavies/MacData/afs.sdavies/MacData/afs.course/other/sp275/www/organicmyth.pdf
http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/organic.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14079717/The-Seven-Most-Dangerous-Myths-About-Organic
Funny how this conversation went from soluble fiber to "you hippie, complaining about preservatives!" in one angry AC troll.
Someone had to do it.
Companies can NOT simply add 'organic' as a label their product. It does mean something and can be used if the product does not meet specific criteria.
If you want to claim: "Organic" (or a similar statement):
Your product: Must contain at least 95% organic ingredients, not counting added water and salt.
Must not contain added sulfites.
May contain up to 5% of:
1. non-organically produced agricultural ingredients which are not commercially available in organic form; and/or
2. other substances allowed by 7 CFR 205.605.
Your label MUST:
Show an ingredient statement.
List the organic ingredients as "organic" when other organic labeling is shown.
1 Water and salt included as ingredients must not be identified as organic. (IS)
Show below the name and address of the handler (bottler, distributor, importer, manufacturer, packer, processor, etc.) of the finished product, the statement:
"Certified organic by ___" or similar phrase, followed by the name of the Certifying Agent. Certifying Agent seals may not be used to satisfy this requirement. (IP)
Your label MAY show:
The term "Organic" to modify the product name. (PDP/IP/OP)
"X% organic" or "X% organic ingredients." (PDP/IP/OP)
The USDA Organic seal and/or certifying agent seal(s). (PDP/OP)
The certifying agent business/Internet address or telephone number. (IP)
1 To identify an ingredient as organically produced, in the ingredients statement, use the word, "organic" in conjunction with the name of the ingredient, or an asterisk or other reference mark which is defined below the ingredient statement.
"But organic is the way to go! If it's natural, it's good for you"
This always gives me a chuckle.
google amantin, alpha variant is fine. 100% organic in both senses of the word.
Not good for you.