The new fountain of youth may be an empty cupboard.
Starve a little and you’ll live longer, is the new conventional wisdom –when you restrict calories, lots of good things happen to prevent aging.
Looking back at the people posting on the lorcaserin post who are on the trial and who don’t feel like eating — isn’t that extreme caloric restriction, too? Aren’t there health-prolonging effects of lorcaserin (and other 5-HT2c agonists)?
(Vintage stop motion puppet-toon of Little Miss Muffet, Old Mother Hubbard, Queen of Hearts, and Humpty Dumptycourtesy Internet Archive.org)
Resveratrol — found in red wine, among other things — is though to have a similar effect.
(See, here, for a recent PLOS paper on overlapping transcript profiles, and here for a Bloomberg report). I won’t go into all the ins and outs of NFkβ, except to say that extreme caloric restriction seems to be a life-prolonging effect, so long as it doesn’t go on too long.
The big pharmas are interested in this — Glaxo just acquired Sirtris for $750MM this week — a company that is commercializing resveratrol-analogs and related molecules.
What’s the big deal with resveratrol and why is Sirtris worth almost a billion dollars?
But the NHANES data shows the opposite, overweight is good, underweight is bad:
* Underweight individuals (BMI of less than 18.5) had a higher risk of death with nearly 34,000 more deaths than expected.
* Being overweight (BMI of 25-29.9) was not associated with excess mortality. The study found that 87,000 fewer deaths than expected were associated with being overweight.
http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/fs050419.htm
Sandra, Sandra, Sandra (said in tone of Marcia, Marcia, Marcia).
OK, for the sake of argument let’s assume that having a BMI of 25-29.9 is not detrimental to one’s health as compared to those of BMI 18.5 to 25. Let’s assume that for anyone of normal or overweight that a day or two of fasting a month will provide the same effects as resveratrol: caloric restriction basically gives the cells a rest (to vastly oversimplify).
Using an appetite suppressant for caloric restriction seems to be a shortcut, is my point.
Actually, my point was really that Glaxo overpaid because I bet you can get the resveratrol effects by caloric restriction (overlapping transcripts and all).