Eating less food by forty percent could extend your life by twenty years, claim researchers from the Institute of Health Ageing at University College London. Researchers are searching for, which type of genetics and lifestyle that can be adapted to counterbalance the effects of ageing and to add more years to individual’s life.
Lead investigator Dr Piper and team developing one line of inquiry that how the life of a rat can be extended by up to thirty percent simply by reducing its food intake. If you reduce the diet of a rat by forty percent it will live for twenty to thirty percent longer.
Therefore, they would be talking twenty years of human life as this has proven in other animal studies. The team also studied fruit flies, which share sixty percent of human genes and age in an analogous manner as mice. Researchers have already extended the healthy lifespan in both flies and mice with the help of tailored diet and drug treatments.
They hope that combination of drug treatments and tailored diet will also work to extend human life. If they successfully discover the genes occupied with ageing they would be able to delay the ageing process. Dr Piper and colleagues has extended the lifespan of organisms by single genes mutation.
They have also successfully reduced the effects of a mutation which may cause Alzheimer’s disease. They claim to combat the age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurodegeneration. But Dr Piper warned that the field of research into extending life is only a decade old, so remains theoretical.
To treat all above said age-related diseases is their unique approach because they are being caused by the process of ageing itself that sets their research apart, added Dr Piper. The research will be demonstrated at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in London.