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Science: Study: Smelling Food Could Speed Aging
Tulsa World
02-14-07
Geneticist says some life-extending benefits may be lost to those heavenly smells.
Plug your nose, live a little longer. That's the take-home message from a study showing that mere whiffs of food can shorten a fly's life.
Studies in worms, flies, mice and monkeys have shown that aging can be slowed by cutting way back on calories consumed. Loosely organized experiments in humans are ongoing.
Scott Pletcher, a geneticist at the Huffington Center on Aging at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, knew that the mere scent of food could block some of the life-extending effects of caloric restriction in tiny, soil-dwelling worms. So he and his colleagues conducted similar tests in flies.
Sure enough, when calorie-restricted flies -- which tend to live about 50 percent longer than normal -- were housed in containers with the smell of a favorite food wafting in, the life-extending benefits of their diet were reduced by about 20 percent.
And mutant flies with defective senses of smell lived 56 percent longer than their smell-enabled counterparts, even though they ate all they wanted.
Odor may affect people the same way, Pletcher said. He said food smells alone trigger a raft of biochemical and hormonal changes that, while not as intense as those that occur when eating, nonetheless appear to be implicated in the aging process.
Tulsa World
02-14-07
Geneticist says some life-extending benefits may be lost to those heavenly smells.
Plug your nose, live a little longer. That's the take-home message from a study showing that mere whiffs of food can shorten a fly's life.
Studies in worms, flies, mice and monkeys have shown that aging can be slowed by cutting way back on calories consumed. Loosely organized experiments in humans are ongoing.
Scott Pletcher, a geneticist at the Huffington Center on Aging at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, knew that the mere scent of food could block some of the life-extending effects of caloric restriction in tiny, soil-dwelling worms. So he and his colleagues conducted similar tests in flies.
Sure enough, when calorie-restricted flies -- which tend to live about 50 percent longer than normal -- were housed in containers with the smell of a favorite food wafting in, the life-extending benefits of their diet were reduced by about 20 percent.
And mutant flies with defective senses of smell lived 56 percent longer than their smell-enabled counterparts, even though they ate all they wanted.
Odor may affect people the same way, Pletcher said. He said food smells alone trigger a raft of biochemical and hormonal changes that, while not as intense as those that occur when eating, nonetheless appear to be implicated in the aging process.
