Healthy and unhealthy food inside hour glass. In 1935, in the labs of Cornell University, a discovery was made that should have taken the world by storm.
It was all thanks to Prof Clive McCay, an American nutritionist, and a group of rats. Or rather, several groups of rats – McCay had split the rodents up, allowing some to eat as much as they wanted while the others lived on substantially reduced rations.
After 30 months, all the rats that were allowed to eat what they liked had died. But just under half of the animals on the restricted diet were still going strong. In fact, by the end of the experiment , McCay found that the carefully restricted diet almost doubled the average lifespan of a rat.
You might worry that the calorie-counting animals were doddering along, unable to summon the energy even to die long after their well-fed brethren had copped it. This wasn’t the case: the restricted diet rats were also healthier. They mostly evaded cancer, had fewer lung and kidney problems and even had silkier fur.
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Overall, McCay’s findings suggested it might be possible to influence the ageing process through diet – that what you eat could effectively slow your ageing on a biological level.
This absolutely remarkable finding didn’t really go anywhere for decades – perhaps because US life expectancy at the time was just 60 years. Fewer people would have been concerned with ageing well, simply because far fewer of them could look forward to ageing at all.
Fortunately for us, this area of science has seen a resurgence of interest in recent years. Results similar to McCay’s have now been seen in other animals, from worms and flies to trout and dogs. Prof Clive McCay’s experiments in the 1930s lead to some startling findings regarding nutrition and lifespan in rats. – Photo credit: Cornell University Faculty Biographical Files/Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections/Cornell University Library We can also now study mice on restricted diets and see that their ageing is indeed slowing down by looking at the ticking of their ‘epigenetic clocks’ (a popular method of measuring biological […]
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