The Agenda š
News bulletin š°
The longevity diet
Recent funding in longevity š°
Upcoming events š
Jobs in longevity š§āš¼
1/ News bulletin š°
š« Cross-country study shows Mediterranean diet associated with longer healthspan - data from 130 countries with populations of 1 million or more
ā¢ļø Newcastle study shows senolytic interventions in radiation damaged mice rescue premature ageing - results were significant but only moderately substantial
š§ mTOR-dependent and independent induced autophagy shows promise in mouse model of Alzheimerās Disease - behavioral and neuronal deficits restored
š©ø Blood donations appear to slow skin ageing by reducing iron deposits - procedure increased dermal thickness and collagen content in old mice
š Targeting fibrosis increases female reproductive lifespan in mice - conducted through the removal of fibrotic collagen from the mouse ovary
2/ The longevity diet
Everyone knows the basic rules of eating healthily, but new data is taking dietary advice to a new level. Consuming āsubstantially moreā beans and lentils, vegetables, fish and wholegrains, and less alcohol, red meat and sugary drinks, could see your left extended by an extra decade or more.
However, this ālongevity dietā isnāt just the latest fad, it is the product of more than a lifespan of scientific research. And the diet isnāt merely designed to prevent chronic illness, but to actually slow down the ageing process.
Itās not new information that our diets can influence our lifespans. Millions of people die prematurely every year from a lack of calories and nutrients, and a further 11 million die each year from too many calories. Excess consumption leads to obesity and its signature consequences: cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. Typical Western diets are also high in sugars, refined starches and saturated fats and low in wholefoods, which is highly disruptive to oneās metabolism. For example, high sugar diets induce excessive insulin release, a hormone that controls blood sugar levels and has a direct impact on ageing. It is fair to say, Western diets donāt push the longevity lever in the right direction.
Lars Fadnes, professor of global public health at the University of Bergen, has devised a dietary approach to longevity and says the earlier you start the better. But even if you are in your sixties and start eating what is prescribed, you could gain up to 8 extra years.
Using data from a research project called the Global Burden of Disease study, which analysed diets and related illnesses, Fadnes and his team estimated the benefits to life expectancy should people consume an āoptimalā longevity diet that removed inflammation-promoting foods and replaced them with healthier produce.
The results were staggering. A 20-year-old man could live 13 years longer if he stuck to every recommended change, and 7 years if he adhered to what Fadnes calls the āfeasibilityā diet, a midway point of compromise. For women of the same age, the gains were 11 and 6 years.
Food4HealthyLife, a calculator, estimates the benefits to life expectancy of making these changes to your diet. It shows me that, at 28, I can expect to live another 49 years. Were I to adopt the longevity diet approach, I could raise my life expectancy by 13 years to live until I am 89.9. Iād just have to eat more pulses and more fruit, and cut back on alcohol a bit.
However you need not completely change your diet, and if a gradual approach was preferred there is a clear rank order to the importance dietary changes. Reducing red and processed meats was one of the most important shifts, adding an average 1.6 years to a young womanās lifespan and 1.9 years to a manās.
The biggest gains in lifespan stemmed from eating more legumes, such as edamame, chickpeas and lentils, which added more than 2 years of life for someone who made changes in their twenties. Adding wholegrains and nuts produced similarly positive results, with Jan-Magnus Okland, a co-author on the paper, saying he now eats āa handful of nuts every dayā. Consuming greater volumes of fruit and vegetables had a smaller impact in relative terms, since most people have already harvested some benefits by consuming fruit and veg daily already.
Itās not the first time that dietary manipulation has been implicated in longevity. Caloric restriction such as intermittent fasting, e.g. the 5:2 diet, in which you fast on 2 days a week, or time-restricted eating, in which you consume all of your meals within 8 hours of a day, avoiding calories for the remaining 16, has long been touted as a way to slow the ageing process by helping the body remove damaged cells and regenerate healthier cells, a process called autophagy.
New research however, increasingly shows that is only part of the story. The contents of our diet matters too. In a paper published in the journal Cell, Valter Longo, professor of gerontology and biological sciences and director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, demonstrates dietary changes can help, and the life-enhancement is likely to be greater if you eat no less than 3 to 4 hours before bedtime and include an occasional five-day fast, restricting intake to about 750 calories a day, every few months.
The longevity diet can be a valuable complement to standard healthcare and if taken as a consistent preventative measure, could aid in sustaining health into advanced age. You may not be what you eat, but your biological age certainly is.
3/ Recent funding in longevity š°
VitalTech, a digital health platform that integrates real-time health monitoring, raises $14.1M
Shoreline Biome raises $800k to develop tools to manage a healthy gut biome
Euformatics Wins ā¬350K European grant to develop Next Generation Sequencing workflows
ActivArmor raises $38k to develop splints that can accelerate injury healing
4/ Upcoming events š
š The Fifth Ending Age-Related Diseases Conference takes place virtually on August 11-14, 2022, where youāll be able to hear the latest developments from the leaders of rejuvenation biotechnology research and investment.
š©šŖ The Rejuvenation Startup Summit returns this year in Berlin, Germany on October 14-15. This is a vibrant networking event that brings together startups and members of the longevity venture capital/investor ecosystem, all aiming to create therapies to vastly extend the healthy human lifespan.
š§šŖ The Eurosymposium on Health Ageing is a unique biennial meeting of scientists working on the biology of ageing, and their next meeting is in Belgium, November 24-26th.
5/ Jobs in longevity š§āš¼
Elysium // Director of Scientific Communications // New York, NY
Humacyte // Bioprocessing Associate // Durham, NC
Altos Labs // Computational Scientist // San Francisco, CA
Elevian // Protein Biochemistry Scientist // Newton, MA
Gameto // Fertilo Bioinformatician // Madrid, Spain