Prolonging life and preventing cancer: less sugar!
Biologists have proven the benefits of fasting at the cellular levelMembrane
Scientists at the University of Alabama (UAB) have studied how the lack of glucose affects the life expectancy and health of human lung cells.
Biologists have tracked the development of two colonies of cells that are in normal conditions (normal glucose content) and with a severe shortage of this most common of sugars consumed in food. Healthy and precancerous human lung cells were used in the study. Scientists have been observing the growth of colonies for several weeks.
"We tested the ability of cells to divide, recorded the number of surviving units. As a result, we found that limiting the level of incoming glucose leads to an increase in the lifespan of healthy cells. At the same time, the precancerous ones die off en masse," says lead researcher Trygve Tollefsbol (Trygve Tollefsbol).
Scientists have also found out the reason why this happens. They calculated two key genes regulating the cellular response to sugar deficiency. The first one, hTERT, encodes the enzyme telomerase, which allows cells to divide indefinitely. The second, p16, encodes a protein that suppresses tumor development.
"These genes act in the opposite way. Accordingly, they produce different effects on different cells," Tollefsbol explains. In healthy cells, under the influence of the environment, the activity of hTERT increases, and p16 decreases. Both factors lead to increased colony growth. The opposite effect is shown on precancerous cells (an increase in p16 activity, a decrease in hTERT). As a result, the pathogenic cells die off.
It turns out that limiting a person's glucose intake helps him to maintain health at the cellular level: prolong the life of the good building blocks of the body and accelerate the natural death of the bad ones.
The new data will allow us to better understand how, with the help of calorie restriction and certain substances in the diet, to prolong life and overcome diseases associated with aging, the Americans write in a university press release (UAB Researchers Link Calorie Intake to Cell Lifespan, Cancer Development).
Earlier, scientists have repeatedly proved that fasting is good for health, and one group even conducted a 20-year study on monkeys. (However, in fairness, other results should be mentioned.)
The current study has made its way to a new, cellular level, and the results of this work are directly related to humans (and not to laboratory animals, as is usually the case), the authors of the work write in an article in FASEB Journal (Yuanyuan Li et al., Glucose restriction can extend normal cell lifespan and impair precancerous cell growth through epigenetic control of hTERT and p16 expression).
"We hope that our discovery will be the first in a series of similar ones. The study of other cell types will allow us to develop new methods of prolonging people's lives," adds Tollefsbol.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru23.12.2009