Eat less, live longer
Geneticists told how to slow down the aging of cells
Irina Ziganshina, Novye Izvestia
If you want to reduce the level of inflammation in the body, delay the onset of age–related diseases and live longer - eat less.
This conclusion was reached by a team of scientists from the Salk Institute for Biological Research (California), who published their new work in the journal Cell.
A popular retelling of the article by Ma et al. Caloric Restriction Reprograms the Single-Cell Transcriptional Landscape of Rattus Norvegicus Aging is published on the Institute's website (Eat less, live longer) – VM.
This study is the most detailed report to date on the cellular effects of a calorie-restricted diet in rats. Aging is the main risk factor for many diseases, including cancer, dementia, diabetes. The benefits of a low-calorie diet, which can be an effective way to slow down this process, have been known before, but the new work for the first time clearly shows the mechanism by which calorie restriction affects cells that change with age.
The authors of the study compared rats on a regular diet with rats whose caloric intake was 30% poorer. The animals were observed from 18 to 27 months of age: in terms of our life, this is equivalent to if a person followed a calorie-restricted diet from 50 to 70 years.
At the beginning and at the end of the observations, scientists isolated and analyzed a total of 168,703 cells from 40 cell types in 56 rats. The cells were taken from adipose tissue, liver, kidneys, aorta, skin, bone marrow, brain and muscles. The scientists measured the levels of gene activity in each isolated cell using genetic sequencing technology, and also studied the overall composition of cell types in all tissues.
It turned out that many of the changes that occurred with age in rats on a regular diet did not affect rats on a low-calorie diet: even in elderly rodents, if they ate little, tissues and cells remained almost the same as in young ones. A total of 57% of the age-related changes in cell composition observed in rat tissues on a normal diet were absent in rats on a diet with limited calorie intake.
Scientists have examined how cells and genes related to immunity, inflammation and lipid metabolism change. It turned out that the number of immune cells in almost every tissue under study increased dramatically as the rats from the control group aged, but it did not depend on the age of the rats receiving a diet with a limited number of calories. In brown adipose tissue (a type of adipose tissue), a lean diet returned the expression levels of many anti-inflammatory genes to those observed in young animals.
The main finding of the study is that an increase in the inflammatory response during aging can be suppressed by calorie restriction. The older we get, the more relevant the phrase "We are what we eat" becomes to us: the state of cells with age most clearly depends on the interaction with the environment, and diet is one of the components of this interaction.
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