When you say "mostly optional" I assume you mean working out will drastically reduce the rate of muscle loss. Is that what you mean or are there other intervention?
Yeah exactly. Continuing to use your muscles so they don’t deteriorate, sleeping a good amount, and eating a decent diet that includes enough protein to sustain them.
You will still get less strong with age even if you do this but vast bulk of sarcopenia is just atrophy. Also worth noting that preservation is easier than gaining. Meaning if you get strong you can keep most of it with less effort than it took to acquire it.
I've seen it unironically cited in psychology textbooks as a 'benefit' to dementia that you become increasingly unaware of just how much you've lost. It's not totally untrue I suppose, so I can see the angle, but it's also clearly the copest of copes.
One major reason to be aware of decline is so you can plan. That may include long term care or obviously more dramatic measures. It creates a gigantic set of issues for families when someone declines who had no plan at all and is in denial or unable to understand their own decline.
Eh, that seems to be only partially true. You are forever aware of the feeling of location loss, positional unawareness. You wake up every minute, in a strange city, strange place, with strange people. Normal reaction to that is stress and panic. Which is why you get medicated against fear and stress as dementia patient.
Not OP, but prolonged fasting is well understood to significantly affect the immune system.
I doubt not eating for a single day while fighting a cold is going to matter though, especially if sedentary/sick in bed.
During a prolonged fast you'll be decreasing white blood cells, which doesn't seem ideal if you're already sick. But AIUI it's mainly this aspect that "reboots the immune system", and can prevent illness once feeding has resumed and the catabolism undone. Basically you get a refreshed immune system, afterwards:
“When you starve, the system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged,” Longo said. “What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we started thinking, well, where does it come from?” [0]
Is stopping eating 3-4 hours really legit or just some traditional thought we've heard over and over again that sounded intuitive that we've come to accept? Lots of cultures that are long lived have late night meals and from a quick NCBI search, I found that even the old perceptions are getting proven wrong. Example:
Try it with biostatistics device both ways. You will see your resting heart rate is substantially lower when you stop eating early, and this will improve your HRV and deep sleep stats.
Less calories means less energy, which means you have to use the energy you do have more optimally. If there was no impact on cognitive performance, then all that means is you spent extra energy before doing stuff that didn't require the excess energy.
A good example might be overthinking. Some of our lives and jobs are much simpler than we realize.
They are assessing cognitive performance with a single test, and these lemur have a special ‘low energy’ mode, so there’s many options. For instance it might be that their single test succeeds while other brain capacities are impacted (for instance social, emotionally capacities or memory).
Caloric restriction has never been shown to increase lifespan in large primates. And the experiments showing increased lifespan in lower animals have been highly artificial with the subjects protected from infections and injuries. Caloric restriction in elderly people causes sarcopenia, which greatly increases the risk of disabling orthopedic injuries.
I wonder if some of the benefits come not from caloric restriction itself but reduction of something else that's harmful.
> Regenerative healing also requires freedom from substances that inhibit the digestion of the debris. The great decline in proteolytic autophagy that occurs with aging (Del Roso, et al., 2003) can be reduced by inhibiting the release of fatty acids. This effect is additive to the antiaging effects of calorie restriction, suggesting that it is largely the decrease of dietary fats that makes calorie restriction effective (Donati, et al., 2004, 2008)[0]
While most experiments done until now have investigated the effect of calorie restriction, there have also been some more specific experiments.
Some experiments have obtained similar lifespan extension by protein intake restriction, not by energy intake restriction. A few other experiments have obtained the same effect by restricting only the methionine intake.
Methionine is required for the initiation of the synthesis of any protein. When it is insufficient, the rate of protein synthesis slows down everywhere in the body.
Assuming that all these experimental results are correct and that they have a more general applicability than for the few tested animals, then it appears that the lifespan extension is achieved by slowing down the rate of protein synthesis.
This might work by preventing an unnecessary recycling of the body components, which eventually accumulates defects. Nevertheless, in the case of injuries or illness, a reduced rate of protein synthesis is very undesirable.
It is likely that in big or long-lived animals the rate of protein synthesis is already diminished and close to the minimum acceptable, because such animals have lower energy intake per mass needs (even when comparing poikilotherms).
This would explain why such lifespan extension methods do not seem to work in big animals. It is likely that they have low or no effect in humans too.
There are aboriginal people with a diet low in protein like New Guinea highlanders who subsides mostly on sweet potato and other starchy vegetables. Their protein intake is like 35-40 grams/day, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7328441/
Yet they are not known for a particularly long life span. One can argue as aboriginal people they do not have access to modern medicine and most people die from preventable diseases. Yet it does allow to doubt that just by protein restrictions one can noticeably prolong life in humans.
Also their dies is low in fats, so again, this makes one skeptical towards claims that low-fat diet prolongs life.
I wonder if there's a benefit to eating precisely the amount of calories needed to prevent notable muscle loss with as little surplus as possible, or to CR in the young that you stop when you're older?
It's very difficult for elderly people to build and maintain lean muscle mass because the endocrine and digestive systems become less effective with age. After about age 70, progressive muscle loss is unavoidable (at least without heavy use of performance enhancing drugs which cause other negative side effects). So, if you want to live a long life without falling down the stairs and breaking a hip when you're 80 then you need to build up some extra muscle when you're young. That means eating a relatively high protein diet (but not a caloric surplus unless you're underweight).
I'm a bit lost. In a different study [0](also playing with food restrictions) there is mention of torpor, a mechanism that these lemurs have that kicks in under calorie restriction and changes their metabolism and body composition.
Yet from the article
> but the effects in humans and other primates remain controversial
If these lemurs have specific energy mechanisms proper to their species and adapted to their ecosystem, does any conclusion extend to humans and other species ?
Can’t draw conclusions unless the subjects themselves are humans, and unless the studies have replicable results. It’s either that or everything is mere speculation.
35 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 88.2 ms ] threadIf you are in decline but unaware of it, is that a bad thing?
It’s associated with many bad health impacts and reduced practical abilities.
If your brain is worse you are worse at a lot of things.
You will still get less strong with age even if you do this but vast bulk of sarcopenia is just atrophy. Also worth noting that preservation is easier than gaining. Meaning if you get strong you can keep most of it with less effort than it took to acquire it.
The wikipedia has a good overview of factors and prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcopenia
One major reason to be aware of decline is so you can plan. That may include long term care or obviously more dramatic measures. It creates a gigantic set of issues for families when someone declines who had no plan at all and is in denial or unable to understand their own decline.
Stop eating 3-4 hours before bedtime to improve sleep. Same principle.
I doubt not eating for a single day while fighting a cold is going to matter though, especially if sedentary/sick in bed.
During a prolonged fast you'll be decreasing white blood cells, which doesn't seem ideal if you're already sick. But AIUI it's mainly this aspect that "reboots the immune system", and can prevent illness once feeding has resumed and the catabolism undone. Basically you get a refreshed immune system, afterwards:
“When you starve, the system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged,” Longo said. “What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we started thinking, well, where does it come from?” [0]
[0] https://news.usc.edu/63669/fasting-triggers-stem-cell-regene...
[0] -- Ketogenic diet activates protective γδ T cell responses against influenza virus infection https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/sciimmunol.aav2026
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4425165/
A good example might be overthinking. Some of our lives and jobs are much simpler than we realize.
Based on the output of deep learning models, most of our lives and jobs probably don't even require sentience.
> Regenerative healing also requires freedom from substances that inhibit the digestion of the debris. The great decline in proteolytic autophagy that occurs with aging (Del Roso, et al., 2003) can be reduced by inhibiting the release of fatty acids. This effect is additive to the antiaging effects of calorie restriction, suggesting that it is largely the decrease of dietary fats that makes calorie restriction effective (Donati, et al., 2004, 2008)[0]
[0] https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/regeneration-degenerat...
Some experiments have obtained similar lifespan extension by protein intake restriction, not by energy intake restriction. A few other experiments have obtained the same effect by restricting only the methionine intake.
Methionine is required for the initiation of the synthesis of any protein. When it is insufficient, the rate of protein synthesis slows down everywhere in the body.
Assuming that all these experimental results are correct and that they have a more general applicability than for the few tested animals, then it appears that the lifespan extension is achieved by slowing down the rate of protein synthesis.
This might work by preventing an unnecessary recycling of the body components, which eventually accumulates defects. Nevertheless, in the case of injuries or illness, a reduced rate of protein synthesis is very undesirable.
It is likely that in big or long-lived animals the rate of protein synthesis is already diminished and close to the minimum acceptable, because such animals have lower energy intake per mass needs (even when comparing poikilotherms).
This would explain why such lifespan extension methods do not seem to work in big animals. It is likely that they have low or no effect in humans too.
Yet they are not known for a particularly long life span. One can argue as aboriginal people they do not have access to modern medicine and most people die from preventable diseases. Yet it does allow to doubt that just by protein restrictions one can noticeably prolong life in humans.
Also their dies is low in fats, so again, this makes one skeptical towards claims that low-fat diet prolongs life.
Yet from the article
> but the effects in humans and other primates remain controversial
If these lemurs have specific energy mechanisms proper to their species and adapted to their ecosystem, does any conclusion extend to humans and other species ?
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...