Intermittent fasting makes fruit flies live longer — will it work for people? | 間歇性禁食讓果蠅活得更久

中文版谷歌中文翻譯(90% 準確率) | English translation
Buy/Sell Your Domains Here。在這裡購買/出售您的域名
Contact Dr. Lu for information about cancer treatments。聯繫盧博士,獲取有關癌症治療資訊。
Editor’s note:
It is just common sense that intermittent fasting will help humans as well.  When you eat more than what you need, you exhaust your system.  It is just like you keep pushing the gas pedal when you drive your car. Overeating causes all sorts of health conditions including cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

編者註:

間歇性禁食對人類也有幫助,這只是常識。 當你吃的比你需要的多時,你就會耗盡你的系統。 就像你開車時一直踩油門一樣。 暴飲暴食會導致各種健康狀況,包括癌症、心髒病和糖尿病。

 

News Release

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Columbia University Irving Medical Center

NEW YORK, NY, Sept. 29, 2021–Whether intermittent fasting is called the 5:2 diet or the 16/8 method, celebrities swear that these eating regimens are a great way to lose weight. Fasting is now trendy, but real science backs up claims that fasting two days a week or restricting eating to an eight-hour window each day leads to weight loss.

And scientists have found intermittent fasting has even more health benefits that are not related to weight: Studies in mice and other animals show that intermittent fasting also increases longevity.

But for those who want to adopt intermittent fasting to slow the aging process, there is a catch. In modern society, people are used to three meals a day, and intermittent fasting is hard.

Can the benefits of fasting be packaged in a pill? A new study of fasting fruit flies by Columbia University researchers suggests the answer may be yes.

The study, published Sept. 29 in the journal Nature, revealed how intermittent fasting works inside cells to slow the aging process (at least, for fruit flies) and points to potential ways to get the health benefits of fasting without the hunger pangs.

Intermittent fasting and time-restricted feeding in general limit food, but not overall caloric intake, to specific hours of the day. (In contrast, dietary restriction, which also has been shown to increase longevity, reduces caloric intake.)

“Because intermittent fasting restricts the timing of eating, it’s been hypothesized that natural biological clocks play a role,” says Mimi Shirasu-Hiza, PhD, associate professor of genetics & development at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and an expert in circadian rhythms, who led the study.

Shirasu-Hiza and Matt Ulgherait, PhD, an associate research scientist in her lab, turned to fruit flies to investigate. Fruit flies have similar biological clocks to humans, staying active during daylight and sleeping at night, while also sharing roughly 70% of human disease-related genes. Fruit flies are an excellent model for aging, Shirasu-Hiza says because fruit flies and humans age in similar ways, but since fruit flies only live for two months, aging experiments are more technically feasible.

The researchers put their flies on one of four different schedules: 24-hour unrestricted access to food, 12-hour daytime access to food, 24-hour fasting following by 24-hour unrestricted feeding, or what the researchers called intermittent time-restricted fasting or iTRF (20 hours of fasting followed by a recovery day of unlimited feeding).

Among the four eating schedules, only iTRF significantly extended the lifespan—18% for females and 13% for males.

And the timing of the 20-hour fast was critical: Lifespan increased only for flies that fasted at night and broke their fast around lunchtime. The lifespans of flies that instead fasted all day, eating only at night, did not change.

For the researchers, the role of time was a big clue to how fasting is linked to longevity. They found that a cell-cleaning process kicks in after fasting, but only when fasting occurs during the night. Scientists call the cell-cleaning process autophagy (Greek for self-eating), and the process is known to slow aging by cleaning up and recycling damaged components of the cell.

“We found that the life-extending benefits of iTRF require a functional circadian rhythm and autophagy components,” Shirasu-Hiza says. “When either of those processes were disrupted, the diet had no effect on the animals’ longevity.”

iTRF not only increased the flies’ lifespan, the eating regimen also improved the flies’ “healthspan,” increasing muscle and neuron function, reducing age-related protein aggregation, and delaying the onset of aging markers in muscles and intestinal tissues.

Human cells use the same cell-cleaning processes, so the findings raise the possibility that behavioral changes or drugs that stimulate the cleaning process could provide people with similar health benefits, delaying age-related diseases and extending the lifespan.

“Any type of restricted eating is difficult,” says Ulgherait. “It requires a lot of discipline, and most studies of time-restricted fasting in humans have built in a cheat day to make it more tolerable. It would be much easier to get the same health benefits if we could enhance autophagy  pharmacologically, specifically at night.”

More Information

The study is titled “Circadian Autophagy Drives iTRF-mediated Longevity.”

The other contributors: Adil M. Midoun (PSL Research University, Paris, France), Scarlet J. Park (Scripps Research Institute, Jupiter, FL), Jared Gatto (Columbia), Samantha J. Tener (Columbia), Julia Siewert (Columbia), Naomi Klickstein (Columbia), Julie C. Canman (Columbia), and William W. Ja (Scripps Research Institute).

The research was supported by grants from Charles H. Revson Foundation, AFAR Glenn Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for Aging Research, Celia Lipton Farris and Victor W. Farris Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health (T32GM007088R01GM117407R01GM130764R56AG065986R35GM127049, and R01AG045842), and the Joe W. and Dorothy Dorsett Brown Foundation.

The authors declare no competing interests.

###

Columbia University Irving Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, preclinical, and clinical research; medical and health sciences education; and patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, dentists, and nurses at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. Columbia University Irving Medical Center is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest faculty medical practices in the Northeast. For more information, visit cuimc.columbia.edu or columbiadoctors.org.


Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

$$$ If you are interested in a writer or editor position, check out here.We are hiring. $$$

74

No Responses

Write a response

1 × one =