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Want to live for 20 more years - eat less
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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Want to live long - eat less! Scientists have found that reducing our diet by 40% can extend the average life expectancy by as much as 20 years!
Researchers from the Institute for Healthy Aging at University College London are developing a new therapy, with the help of which they hope to defeat the "disease" called old age. The question of how genetics and lifestyle can be transformed to minimize the manifestations of age processes, moving them back for dozens of years, is being studied.
This will also delay the onset of such age-related ailments as cardiovascular diseases of cancer and neurodegeneration. In one of a series of experiments, scientists noticed that the lifespan of a rat can be substantially prolonged, simply by reducing its diet by 30%.
"If you reduce the rat diet by 40%, it already lives 20-30% longer," says the author of the study, Dr. Piper. "In the human dimension, this is 20 years of life." The relationship between life expectancy and the amount of food eaten exists in all living organisms , even in Labradors. "
Scientists observe and fly flies Drosophila, in which 60% of the genes coincide with human, as well as mice. Researchers managed to prolong the life of both fruit fly and mice using special medicines and a modified diet. Perhaps, the same combination will prove effective against a person.
Dr. Piper and his colleagues learned how to mutate single genes, as well as reduce the effect of mutations that cause Alzheimer's. True, all research on ways to increase life expectancy lasts only 10 years, so that the conclusions can still be considered theoretical.