Nicotinamide riboside effects on aging similar to caloric restriction

Nicotinamide riboside effects on aging similar to caloric restriction
colorado.edu

Edit: and I'll add another sour note... I noticed this now, but how often did i read a piece of journalism outside my area of expertise with equally lazy mistakes, without noticing them?

This is often referred to as the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect":

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

To answer the question, human data showing meaningful benefits that could not be achieved via exercise or calorie restriction would be very interesting. Human data showing some reliable level of reproduction of the benefits of exercise or calorie restriction without side-effects would be good news for the present majority who don't put in the effort to stay in shape. Good news for supplement sellers as well - there is no shortage of people who would pay rather than exercise or eat less, even if the results were mixed or marginal.

In either case, the cost-benefit analysis runs along the lines of (a) as an individual, how much it is worth spending on a supplement that can capture a fraction of the benefits of exercise or calorie restriction, but also (b) is it worth making this a major focus of the research community, versus the rejuvenation biotechnology that can achieve far greater gains? I think (b) is always going to be answered in the negative, for me at least. No calorie restriction mimetic or exercise mimetic can possibly be as good as functional SENS repair biotechnologies. They cannot achieve the results produced by senolytics, or any of the other ways to remove the root causes of aging. If one looks at NAD+ research as the final stage of sirtuin-related calorie restriction research as a whole, it has taken as much funding to get here as it would to completely implement the SENS rejuvenation therapy package in mice. Yet we know that exercise and calorie restriction cannot add decades to healthy life, as is possible in principle for repair therapies.

The data here on human nicotinamide riboside supplementation seems promising in comparison to the results of past sirtuin research, but I'd like to see a larger study group. If that larger group shows similar results, then maybe this is worth it for individuals. Either way, it is appreciated that the authors avoided running a study in overweight individuals - in this part of the field, that just muddies the waters, given the very different effects of sirtuin manipulation on thin versus fat animals. Nonetheless, it still appears to be the case that this is essentially a way to gain some of the beneficial long-term effects of fitness without putting in the physical effort. I expect future NAD+ studies and exercise studies in older individuals to converge in some ways, showing overlapping effects on cellular biochemistry. It is arguable as to whether taking up exercise, eating less, or artificially increasing NAD+ levels should be termed rejuvenation. There is a certainly a sizable grey area at the intersection of repair, compensation, and overriding regulatory signals that respond to aging.