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What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

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Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#81

Post by mrfusion »

collyw wrote: post #66
irremediable wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your claim as true for people who care about their health? The kind of person who has the dedication to do intermittent fasting probably has the dedication to do a fair amount of exercise.

I started intermittent fasting around a year ago, and usually I do do reasonable amount of exercise. I had a health review as part of my work three months after I started. I really wanted to stop, because the fasting was difficult (I was doing two days a week). While before I was fairly healthy, my blood pressure has always been a bit high, as with my cholesterol. After fasting they were both gone down to good levels…

I'm strongly considering starting this. Any tips? (Feel free to email if you don't want to share publicly.)

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#82

Post by lars »

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #32
collyw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientifically I agree with you economically not. We still base our economics system on infinite growth, but that is clearly reaching its limits. People living longer is only going to compound the problems.

We are not even close to discovering the cure for aging, so worrying about how it will change society is very premature. Until we can get a C eelegans worm to live for years, we are not remotely close to stopping aging.

I thought the entirety of the C. elegans 302 neuron neural network had been implemented in code. If we're able to implement accurate copies of them, we have effectively made them immortal. Scale this up to human brains, and we are immortal ourselves.

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#83

Post by dschiptsov »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #5

It is important to note that the fact "Starvation is also a way to live longer." is probably wrong as some scientist have noticed. The problem is that animals in laboratories are "coach potatoes". They don't do the exercise they naturally do in their habitat searching for food. They live overcrowded in small cages and overstressed. Most lab animals are already ill from their artificial habitat, they have diabetes and…

Yeah, the story about lab mouses which came from farms already with diabetes is good one.

But it seems that it is one extreme case. Another extreme would be stories about wandering (note that "wandering") Indian ascetics, who had very modest and not regular meals (low calories, not abundant) but display a very good fitness (compared to average consumers).

The truth is still out there.)

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#84

Post by collyw »

mrfusion wrote: post #81
collyw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started intermittent fasting around a year ago, and usually I do do reasonable amount of exercise. I had a health review as part of my work three months after I started. I really wanted to stop, because the fasting was difficult (I was doing two days a week). While before I was fairly healthy, my blood pressure has always been a bit high, as with my cholesterol. After fasting they were both gone down to good levels…

I'm strongly considering starting this. Any tips? (Feel free to email if you don't want to share publicly.)

First month is tough, getting gradually easier. Probably easier to have a few small snacks to make up your day, followed by a bulky low calorie meal in the evening (I used to go for a small chicken breast in a stir fry with minimal oil - protein feels more satisfying).

Now I kind of enjoy it (one day a week). I occasionally stop, i.e. on holiday, and I do notice a bit of lethargy creeping in a time to time.

Otherwise, just get a cookbook and go for recipes that are less than 600 calories (that's the total I allow my self on a fast day).

Should have the same health test in March, so hopefully one day a week is still doing well (I have a blood pressure monitor to check that and and mine still down, actually it improved when I went from 2 to 1 day a week, maybe because I was eating a lot of crap to try and keep my weight up).

Have a google about for BBC's Horizon "Eat fast live longer". I can't find a full length version on youtube just now, but I am sure it is somewhere on the web. That's what inspired me.

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#85

Post by breck »

I enjoyed the post. Have one thing to add.

IIRC the role of telomeres in aging has been known for twenty or thirty years. I'm blanking on the name, but there was a biotech company that went public in the 90's that had a drug in the works to lengthen or prevent the shortening of telomeres. But two decades later they haven't made much progress.

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#86

Post by tokenadult »

facepalm wrote: post #43
quonn wrote: post #12

"These compromises have been made up ad hoc to avoid the inference that aging evolved to benefit the community, not the individual." Isn't this just group selection again? Has this view become more accepted nowadays among biologists? There are very compelling arguments against it. Maybe a better way to phrase it would be to say that aging has evolved to benefit the offspring, which traditionally happened to make up a…

What arguments are there against it? I had assumed that evolution applies on all levels (and not only to organisms). and what about ants - their evolution would always be to benefit the community, I suppose?

Thank you for asking a follow-up question asking for more information. In general, most biologists are convinced that there is no need for "group selection" processes to explain any biological phenomenon, as individual selection alongside kin selection seem to do the job of explaining phenomena observed so far in evolution.[1]

[1] http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/the-demis...

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/another-c...

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#87

Post by michaelmachine »

amelius wrote: post #9

I wonder what are the currently best established DIY techniques to slow aging. I know low food intake could help, but what else?

The author of this article has a site where he summarizes his suggestions to slow aging http://agingadvice.org/

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#88

Post by ealloc »

reasonattlm wrote: post #76
ekianjo wrote: post #70

This article gets so many things wrong I dont know where to start. The argument that "our bodies are useless after reproduction therefore aging makes us die when we are done" is so flawed in itself. If that was even remotely true, women would die much earlier than men since their bodies' reproductive age stops way earlier. So what is in nature's interest to have women live in their 80s versus men die in their 70s ? T…

In answer to your questions: The grandmother hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis Evolution of sexually dimorphic longevity in humans: http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n2/full/100640.html

I like another theory I read recently: That it's because women's mitochondria are more fine-tuned to their nuclear genome:

"The inheritance of mitochondria is asymmetric: you only get them from your mother, and your father makes no mitochondrial contribution at all. Your father’s mitochondrial contribution dies with him and is not passed on. What does that mean? It means that there can be no selection to fine tune mitochondria to the male nuclear genome."

Mitochondria are extrmely important to the cell and have been linked to many effects of aging. The reasoning above suggests that mitochondria work more poorly in males. And indeed, the paper (linked below) explains that in fruit flies, mitochondrial genes in males are expressed with much higher variability than females.

Your two links depend on human biology, but early male death is a much more general phenomenon. Males die earlier in the vast majority of animals (with gender). This idea could explain it.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/02/06/mothers-curse/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23281153

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#89

Post by reasonattlm »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #5

It is important to note that the fact "Starvation is also a way to live longer." is probably wrong as some scientist have noticed. The problem is that animals in laboratories are "coach potatoes". They don't do the exercise they naturally do in their habitat searching for food. They live overcrowded in small cages and overstressed. Most lab animals are already ill from their artificial habitat, they have diabetes and…

You mischaracterize calorie restriction with optimal nutrition by calling it starvation, and you mischaracterize the current research situation.

The evidence for it to extend healthy, mean, and maximum life span in a wide range of species is very extensive: mice, flies, nematodes, etc, etc, etc. The primate evidence for life span extension is mixed at this time, partially because the two decades-long studies were poorly designed in hindsight, and the expectation is that it doesn't extend life greatly in humans. Nonetheless, it has enormously impressive short term health effects in we primates [1]. If calorie restriction was a pill rather than a lifestyle, you'd beat a path to the manufacturer's door, as it has far greater positive effects on health for basically healthy people than any presently available medical technology.

It is true that there is some concern in the research community over the degree to which laboratory mice are not good reflections of what is being studied. This is not unknown, and it is not unacknowledged. A range of rigorous testing programs aim to do something about past less rigorous results - see for example the NIA Interventions Testing Program [2].

Interestingly it is worthy of note that many past research programs were tainted by inadvertent calorie restriction - the things they tested led to led to lab animals eating less. The effects of calorie restriction on health and life span are many times larger than those produced by most other things under testing.

To address your subtext of animal abuse, the only thing worse than running animal studies to advance medicine and life science knowledge is to not run those studies. Even the path to the future in which near all studies are carried out in tissue engineered flesh or simulation, causing no harm to creatures capable of suffering, requires present animal studies. Researchers want that future as it is better on all counts. Further, studies of calorie restriction and longevity are about the most benign of animal studies: these animals are healthier and longer-lived as a result of the restriction. If you want to do something about animal suffering, farming is the place to start, not research, as it accounts for 99.9% of the harms you dislike.

[1]: http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html

[2]: http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-pr...

Re: What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong

#90

Post by anoonmoose »

hnnewguy wrote: post #58
teekert wrote: post #38

Oh how nice a couple of references to some peer reviewed articles would have been. Quotes like "This is my own perspective, shared by a handful of world-class aging scientists, but it is not yet mainstream." make all my scientific alarms go off. It is an interesting way of looking at it though.

> all my scientific alarms go off Is it required on HN that every article be terse list of peer-reviewed facts?

Some days it just feels like every "scientific" article posted to HN is just someone's opinion with no data, and the only reason they even get upvoted is because people who probably didn't even read the article wanted to argue about it.
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