Growing old is usually seen as one of life鈥檚 inevitabilities, but that hasn鈥檛 stopped the anti-ageing industry from flourishing, based on hopes and claims of delaying our expiry date.
But what if, rather than potions and elixirs, the ticket to a longer life was staring back at you from your dinner plate? This is the assertion being made by several groups of researchers who believe that our diet has the power to add years to human lifespan, as we report in our cover story.
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That may sound obvious 鈥� we are all too aware of how a bad diet has the potential to send us to an early grave. But the new claims suggest the longevity-boosting effects of diet go beyond simply avoiding diet-related conditions, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Instead, the researchers believe there may be ways to hack the body鈥檚 ageing processes and even undo some of the damage accumulated over our lifetimes.
That there could be a cheap and relatively simple way to delay the date of our last supper, while also reducing the burden of disease, is welcome news. But we should be careful of claims that sound too good to be true.
Much of the evidence for such a 鈥渓ongevity diet鈥� is based on animal research, and even then the results can be conflicting. One approach, based on decades of work investigating the biology of ageing, is about to be put to the test in a large trial in people.
If the human body鈥檚 ageing processes can be so easily switched off through our diet, it begs the question as to why it ages at all. For some answers, we can turn to new research on turtles and tortoises that, when kept in captivity, don鈥檛 experience ageing as we know it.
The surprising fact that large and complex vertebrates seem to be better able to withstand the ravages of time means we may have to rethink the evolutionary forces at work 鈥� and lends credence to those claims that perhaps even ageing isn鈥檛 as unstoppable a force as we thought.
