Eliminating Distractions in Longevity Research
This is the sixth in a series of timed posts. The way these work is that if it takes me more than one hour to complete the post, an applet that I made deletes everything I’ve written so far and I abandon the post. Check out previous examples here, here, here, here, and here. I placed the advertisement before I started my writing timer.
VitaDAO is a longevity-focused Decentralized Autonomous Organization that has just funded a study by Pabis et al. that left me stunned. One of the study’s results might overturn 89 years of longevity research, and all it took was checking a meta-analytic moderator.
The research that’s come into question is on the benefits of caloric restriction for lifespan. The idea behind this research is that eating just enough to live supports a longer life. The extent of the benefit on the table here has been thought to potentially be pretty enormous, perhaps even on the order of a 30% or 40% boost to longevity—definitely an attractive idea that’s worth pursuing if your goal is to live a long life, and according to a 2010 review, “the only nongenetic method that extends lifespan in every species studied, including yeast, worms, flies, and rodents.”
Despite there being hundreds of papers on the longevity benefits of caloric restriction, it seems no one bothered to empirically assess if the benefits to the longevity of a given model species were specific to its relatively short- or long-lived strains. In theory, the lifespan extension benefits could be positively, negatively, or not at all correlated with the lifespans of control animals, and if the correlations are positive or negative, that could have serious theoretical implications for the value of caloric restriction.
