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Genetic tricks of the longest-lived animals:
Life, for most of us, ends far too soon—hence the effort by biomedical researchers to find ways to delay the aging process and extend our stay on Earth. But there's a paradox at the heart of the science of aging: The vast majority of research focuses on fruit flies, nematode worms and laboratory mice, because they're easy to work with and lots of genetic tools are available. And yet, a major reason that geneticists chose these species in the first place is because they have short lifespans. In effect, we've been learning about longevity from organisms that are the least successful at the game.
Today, a small number of researchers are taking a different approach and studying unusually long-lived creatures—ones that, for whatever evolutionary reasons, have been imbued with lifespans far longer than other creatures they're closely related to. The hope is that by exploring and understanding the genes and biochemical pathways that impart long life, researchers may ultimately uncover tricks that can extend our own lifespans, too.
Everyone has a rough idea of what aging is, just from experiencing it as it happens to themselves and others. Our skin sags, our hair goes gray, joints stiffen and creak—all signs that our components—that is, proteins and other biomolecules—aren't what they used to be. As a result, we're more prone to chronic diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes—and the older we get, the more likely we are to die each year. "You live, and by living you produce negative consequences like molecular damage. This damage accumulates over time," says Vadim Gladyshev, who researches aging at Harvard Medical School. "In essence, this is aging."
This happens faster for some species than others, though—the clearest pattern is that bigger animals tend to live longer lives than smaller ones. But even after accounting for size, huge differences in longevity remain. A house mouse lives just two or three years, while the naked mole rat, a similar-sized rodent, lives more than 35. Bowhead whales are enormous—the second-largest living mammal—but their 200-year lifespan is at least double what you'd expect given their size. Humans, too, are outliers: We live twice as long as our closest relatives, the chimpanzees.
Perhaps the most remarkable animal Methuselahs are among bats. One individual of Myotis brandtii, a small bat about a third the size of a mouse, was recaptured, still hale and hearty, 41 years after it was initially banded. That is especially amazing for an animal living in the wild, says Emma Teeling, a bat evolutionary biologist at University College Dublin who coauthored a review exploring the value of bats in studying aging in the 2018 Annual Review of Animal Biosciences. "It's equivalent to about 240 to 280 human years, with little to no sign of aging," she says. "So bats are extraordinary. The question is, Why?"
Journal References:
1.) Sarah J. Mitchell, Morten Scheibye-Knudsen, Dan L. Longo, et al. Animal Models of Aging Research: Implications for Human Aging and Age-Related Diseases*, (DOI: 10.1146/annurev-animal-022114-110829)
2.) Emma C. Teeling, Sonja C. Vernes, Liliana M. Dávalos, et al. Bat Biology, Genomes, and the Bat1K Project: To Generate Chromosome-Level Genomes for All Living Bat Species, (DOI: 10.1146/annurev-animal-022516-022811)
Zhonghe Ke, Pramit Mallik, Adam B. Johnson, et al. Translation fidelity coevolves with longevity [open], Aging Cell (DOI: 10.1111/acel.12628)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @01:53PM
>> "So bats are extraordinary. The question is, Why?"
Decades of television have taught us the answer... it's because they can fly, drink blood and fight crime.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Monday June 07 2021, @02:15PM (4 children)
https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/90/dr-fuhrmans-nutritarian-pyramid [drfuhrman.com]
Essentially, the more "empty" calories food you eat (like refined sugars and refined starches) the more your metabolism needs to work in search of the nutrients it needs (plus storing or burning those calories) and so the faster you age (since aging is -- in part -- a byproduct of metabolism and energy handling).
Intermittent fasting connects to this as well -- the less energy you burn, the slower you age (although people may also do less from less energy when fasting). Fasting also has benefits by activating cleanup mechanisms our cells have but don't normally use when calories are pouring in. Fasting also makes it possible for the body's cells reset their insulin sensitivity.
tl;dr eat more veggies and less stuff with labels
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @03:48PM
Eat veggies with labels !
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @03:55PM
I've read the argument that starvation works by forcing your body to eat itself. Being smarter than you, it knows which cells are getting on and it munches those ones preferentially. That clears up all the garbage in your system and when you start eating again it makes brand new cells.
Anyway, that's the bullshit. Or you could buy a Wellness(tm) kale + agave smoothue with pomegranate seeds and quinoia.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by js290 on Monday June 07 2021, @04:27PM
Thomas N Seyfried: religious fasting rituals could help maintain mitochondrial health & reduce cancer risks [bit.ly]
Jocko Podcast 45 with Echo Charles - Wooden Leg, Native American Warrior - "make medicine" 4 days solitary, no food nor water [bit.ly]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday June 07 2021, @05:47PM
Smells like a duck. Looks like a duck.
Quack quack.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:03PM (2 children)
If you're Chinese, don't eat bats and you won't get coronaviruses. If you're African, don't fuck bats and you won't get ebola. If you're Hungarian, get bitten by a bat and you can become immortal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:06PM
Ozzy Osbourne begs to differ.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:06PM
I read the longest lived people are the Japanese. So we need to experiment on them to figure out what makes them tick. I have an idea involving a large dose of radiation followed by another large dose of radiation. I think we could collaborate with the North Koreans.
(Score: 1) by js290 on Monday June 07 2021, @04:25PM (2 children)
No desserts. No sweets. No potatoes. No rice. No bread. No pasta... [Cynthia] Kenyon, professor of biochemistry & biophysics at the UCSF... “I did it because we fed our worms glucose and it shortened their lifespan.” [bit.ly]
AHS12 Ron Rosedale MD —The Deeper Roots of Health and Diet as Told by Our Ancestor's Ancestors [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Monday June 07 2021, @06:02PM (1 child)
So don't enjoy life in order to live longer? That kind of defeats the purpose.
(Score: 1) by js290 on Monday June 07 2021, @07:36PM
someone slid down the slippery slope...
We could have universal health by shutting down the USDA & FDA...aging, health as birthright, one-hoss shay... [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by oumuamua on Monday June 07 2021, @04:42PM (1 child)
Diet changes can only get you so far. For instance they talk about more accurate ribosomes correlating with longer lifespans. So CRISPR in the better ribosome and see what it does. If it works in mice will anyone volunteer to try it? Could also be that no doctor would do it out of ethical concerns; the only benefit is possibly living longer but there could be unforeseen downsides.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 07 2021, @05:03PM
With billions of potential volunteers, I expect you could get a pool of 100 candidates rather easily, particularly if you paid all their expenses.
That's the harder nut to crack, not the ethical concerns so much as the fear of malpractice suits and excoriation by the rest of the malpractice suit fearing community.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @05:18PM
Avoid females.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @06:14PM (3 children)
1) Don't get fat.
2) If you get fat, eat less until you are no longer fat. (Not advised. Stick to #1 instead.)
3) Goto 1
Completely serious. The one and only thing that shows a repeatable trend in both animals and humans. Fat = die earlier. Not fat = die later.
The Japanese are famously long lived. Is it their secret fishy diet? Maybe the vending machines with used schoolgirl panties in them? Perhaps just the healthy brace of hyper nationalism? Nah. List of countries by obesity rate [wikipedia.org]. They're the 7th least obese country in the world. Most other countries with comparable non-obesity rates still have major developmental issues meaning there are lots of causes of early to mid-age death (HIV, constant road deaths, etc) that drag their expectancies down.
By the time countries start to get rich and developed, they get stupid and start eating themselves into an early grave while also going hyper-politardical with stuff like 'Fat Lives Matter'. Japan just doesn't give a fuck and does Japan stuff (including fining companies/local governments for having too many fat people) while also having the self discipline to eat reasonable amounts of food.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday June 08 2021, @12:19AM (2 children)
Monaco has Japan beat by 4 years. From this we might conclude that being rich promotes a long life, and there are good reasons to believe this is so. However, there are confusing factors: Monaco has an extraordinarily large portion of foreign-born residents, who are presumably both healthy and wealthy when they move to Monaco.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:43AM
I think you're onto something. Berate
fatgayweirdeveryone inferior to you. Then we will finally have our1950's1920'sWHATEVER@!!!!!!! @@111111 paradise.(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @08:58AM
Monaco is generally not compared to other nations because they have some unique and incomparable factors, and other factors that are simply not measured. For instance they have no public obesity rate, and anecdotally it seems to be extremely close to 0. They also have a traffic fatality rate of 0, and other such unique characteristics.
It doesn't matter if you're wealthy and get heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or whatever else. Your life expectancy, relative to a poor person, might be slightly higher. But your life expectancy, relative to a person whose life decisions (do not get fat), made them much less likely to suffer such ailment - is going to be dramatically lower.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dltaylor on Tuesday June 08 2021, @12:17AM (2 children)
Sorry, skinnies, but fat vs lean, while probably of value, is not the whole answer. If any of you read the summary, there are outliers in near species relatives. Hard to imagine fat bats being strong or agile enough feed themselves, yet at least one Myotis brandtii has outlived other similarly-sized mammals (maybe its name was Lazarus Long). Read the whole paragraph for broader sample aging vs size comparisons for more than a single instance.
I suspect Heinlein got it right, at least in part. If you want to live longer, pick grandparents that were/are longer lived.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @04:44AM
Also don't drink, smoke, have sex, vote liberal or look at me funny. Or I'll fuck you up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @03:39PM
The reason obesity impairs longevity has nothing to do with physical ability in humans. It does dramatically impair that as well but we live in a day and age where it doesn't matter that much if you can't run a mile or do a pull up in terms of immediate survival.
The reason obesity impairs life expectancy is because it's a strong factor in countless other diseases (cancer, diabetes, various cardiovascular diseases including heart disease, etc) that have a dramatic impact on life expectancy. For instance heart disease killed 659,000 people in the most recent numbers from the CDC. Contrast that against the 503,000 deaths caused by COVID in one year. Cancer also killed 599,000. The CDC states [cdc.gov] that the two most important factors in reducing your risk of cancer are (1) not smoking and (2) not getting fat.
This [wikipedia.org] is a list of nations by life expectancy. This [wikipedia.org] is a list of nations by obesity rate.
The connection is obvious and causal. The only thing that confounds it is, as mentioned elsewhere, that most nations that are thin tend to be relatively undeveloped and so there are many factors in regular life that dramatically lower life expectancy. Africa goes without saying, but even in parts of Asia - one of the main factors people may not appreciate is extremely unsafe roads. When a good chunk of people are dying in car crashes each year, it has a major sagging effect on your life expectancy.
So you need a mixture of 1) developed + "safe" nation and 2) people with enough self discipline not to eat themselves into human blobs. And from there you get places like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. Seriously look at the bottom of the obesity list (which is the lowest rates of obesity) and then contrast each developed nation you bump into on the life expectancy table. They are invariably strongly connected.