Diet trumps "magic medicine" when it comes to anti-aging

People's life paces are becoming increasingly frantic as civilization advances, and the phenomena of ordering takeaway and consuming fast food are also fairly common. In this situation, it appears that ensuring a balanced diet is more challenging.

A healthy diet on a daily basis is more important than paying special attention to meals after being sick. In reality, poor eating habits are the root cause of many chronic metabolic disorders, including obesity and cardiovascular disease. It is clear that the amount, type, and combination of foods consumed have a significant impact on human health.

Researchers from the University of Sydney published a study titled "Nutritional reprogramming of mouse liver proteome is dampened by metformin, resveratrol, and rapamycin" in the Metabolism in November 2021. According to the findings, a good diet may be more helpful than medication in treating diseases like diabetes, stroke, and heart disease.

Nutrition, including total calories and macronutrient balance, was found to have a stronger influence on aging and metabolic health in mouse models than three regularly used anti-aging drugs—metformin, rapamycin, and resveratrol.

Longevity and health are the eternal vision of mankind. Unfortunately, efforts to develop drugs that promote metabolic health and aging have been made while disregarding the role of dietary choices. Many nutrients, like medications, can target certain biochemical pathways, thereby influencing a person's metabolic health.

"Diet is good medicine. However, current clinical treatments rarely take into account the interaction of drugs with diet. Even these drugs work in the same way and nutrient signaling pathways as diet." Said Professor Charles Perkins, corresponding author of the study.

So, in this study, the researchers wanted to see if drugs or diets are more effective at modifying nutrient sensing and other metabolic pathways and if drug-diet interactions made them more effective.

A complicated mouse study encompassing 40 different feeding treatment regimens, each with differing levels of protein, fat and carbohydrate balance, calorie, and drug content, was designed by the research team. The researchers then looked at how three anti-aging medications (metformin, rapamycin, and resveratrol) affected the liver under varied eating regimes.

A key strength of this study is the use of an advanced nutritional geometry framework that allowed the research team to consider how the mixing and interaction of different nutrients affect health and disease, rather than focusing on any one nutrient alone, a limitation of other nutrition research.

The researchers discovered that the ratio of caloric intake to macronutrients (proteins, fats, and carbohydrates) in the diet had a significant impact on the liver. Protein and total caloric intake, have particularly powerful effects not only on metabolic pathways, but also on the fundamental processes that govern cellular function.

Drugs, on the other hand, act primarily by blocking cells' metabolic responses to diet rather than fundamentally modifying them. Furthermore, the researchers discovered some additional specific connections between the drug's biochemical effects and diet composition: resveratrol, which had a higher influence on cellular changes generated by fat and carbohydrates; metformin and rapamycin, which inhibited the action of dietary protein on mitochondria.

According to David Le Couteur, the study's lead author, "while the study is difficult, it demonstrates the need of studying many different diets at the same time rather than just comparing a few different diets. This is the only way to comprehend the relationship between diet, health, and physiology."

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