101 Year Old Runs London Marathon.
Do you remember this sensational story breaking across news outlets internationally? In April last year Fauja Singh astonished revelers when he completed the London marathon, frankly in a better time than most of us could have achieved.
Fauja Singh was born in 1911.
That was one year before the Titanic sank. One year before the First Balkan War commenced. Three years before the First World War began. Surely he was some kind of fitness fanatic all his life? Nope. He began training for his first marathon at the age of 89.
Fauja Singh was born in 1911.
That was one year before the Titanic sank. One year before the First Balkan War commenced. Three years before the First World War began. Surely he was some kind of fitness fanatic all his life? Nope. He began training for his first marathon at the age of 89.
So what is Singh's secret to such startling fitness when some of his peers got their first hip replacement 30 years prior? He said: child portions of meals.
The London Marathon has always attracted a huge variety of ages but Mr. Singh topped them all. Photo accredited to Martin Addison. (This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.) |
Cue: Calorie Restriction.
Calorie Restriction, or CR, unsurprisingly means cutting out calories. But, you won't achieve it by avoiding carbs like the plague; CR refers to a lower energy but still well balanced and nutritious diet. Basically, all the right components are there, there's just less of them.
I have decided to write this post because it ties very nicely into previous discussion on ageing and increasing lifespan yet it has also been implicated in delaying the onset of many age-related diseases. This brings us neatly back to a question posed in the previous post: should we be trying to find ways to maintain the quality of life as we age? If you dive into the scientific research behind "less food, better form" there actually turns out to be quite a lot there. CR has been linked to preventing diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease - much more than just expanding waistlines.
A theory as to why dietary restriction seems to have these sought after effects in many different organisms is that the stress starvation puts our bodies under is actually a good thing. What kinds of activities might a cell undertake if it is under stress? It will stop making things, because it doesn't have the building blocks that come from our food, and has more time to repair things that are already there - our DNA for example. There are certain genes that are particularly active when we are stressed, aptly known as "stress response genes"; having the fix-it men of our cells around more often really doesn't seem like a bad thing.
WeightWatchers for scientists.
Studies centered on calorie restriction have been conducted in many different model organisms: worms, yeast, flies, rats, monkeys even. How? Well one quite obvious way is to let half your subjects gorge away to their hearts content whereas the other half are provided controlled meals. The technical term for gorging is "ad libitum"; your dieting organisms get about 60-70% of this ad libitum level. It is known that appetite decreases as we get older so an important thing to note is that whilst the gorging animals will generally choose to eat less as they approach the end of their lives, the CR intake is set from the beginning of the experiment and does not change. This means that the gap between the two calorie intakes will gradually close during the course of this experiment. This information comes from a review published in Cell Metabolism which also sets out other methods for studying dietary restriction, should you be interested the source is here.
Calorie restriction has made headlines, diet books and even TV documentaries (BBC's Eat, Fast and Live Longer), but the real question is: who has the willpower to do it?