To live a long and healthy life, a healthy diet from a young age makes the difference, according to a study on yeast.
- Yeast studies show that diet early in life is critical to lifelong health.
- It would therefore be possible to age in good health by improving your diet.
- Until now it was calorie restriction that was known to reduce the deleterious effects of aging.
This is further proof of the beneficial impact of a quality diet on health: researchers from the Babraham Research Institute in England have discovered that eating well as early as possible in life , allows you to age better.
Their study was published in PLOS Biology.
Food: eating less is not the only solution to healthy aging
While it was previously thought that only calorie restriction, which consists of consuming much fewer calories than normal without suffering from malnutrition, improves health in old age and may even prolong lifeso there would be a better alternative.
Indeed, studies in mice show that calorie restriction has limits: it really must be maintained throughout life to have this effect, and the health benefits disappear when you return to a normal diet. . The researchers therefore evaluated the impact of a simple dietary change on the aging process.
To carry out their work, they looked at yeasts, model microorganisms for the study of aging, because they share many of the same cellular mechanisms as animals and humans.
“This line of yeast research helps us find a way to improve healthy aging through diet”, indicated the authors.
Improving the sugar source allows yeast to live healthier
In the experiment, the scientists grew yeast by replacing their usual high-glucose diet with galactose, which is a sugar whose energy power is slower than glucose.
Thus, the source of sugar in the diet was changed, which had a very positive effect. Indeed, researchers noticed that many molecular changes that normally accompany aging were not occurring.
Cells grown with galactose remained in as good shape as young cells, even at old age, although they did not live longer, showing that the period of poor health towards the end of life was significantly reduced, according to the authors.
“We show that diet early in life can steer yeast toward a healthier trajectory. By giving the yeast a different diet without restricting calories, we were able to suppress senescence, when cells no longer divide, and loss of fitness in aged cells.“explains Dr. Dorottya Horkai, principal investigator of the study.