Diet vs Genes

[TomBAvoider]

Al recently posted an interesting study:

 

The role of dietary patterns and exceptional parental longevity in healthy aging.
Gubbi S, Barzilai N, Crandall J, Verghese J, Milman S.
Nutr Healthy Aging. 2017 Dec 7;4(3):247-254. doi: 10.3233/NHA-170028.
PMID: 29276794
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Individuals with exceptional longevity and their offspring manifest a lower prevalence of age-related diseases than families without longevity. However, the contribution of dietary habits to protection from disease has not been systematically assessed in families with exceptional longevity.
OBJECTIVE:
The aim of this study is to compare dietary patterns between individuals with parental longevity and individals without parental longevity.
METHODS:
Dietary intake was evaluated using the Block Brief Food Frequency Questionnaire in 234 community dwelling Ashkenazi Jewish adults aged 65 years and older who were participants of the LonGenity study, which enrolls the offspring of parents with exceptional longevity (OPEL) and offspring of parents with usual survival (OPUS).
RESULTS:
OPEL constituted 38% of the subjects. The two groups had similar daily intake of total calories (1119 vs. 1218 kcal, p = 0.83), grams of cholesterol (141 g vs. 143 g, p = 0.19), and grams of sodium (1324 g vs.1475 g, p = 0.45), in OPEL vs. OPUS respectively. There were also no significant differences in the intake of other macronutrients, micronutrients, nutritional supplements and consumption of various food groups between OPEL and OPUS after adjustment for age and sex.
DISCUSSION:
A healthy diet is associated with a lower risk of several chronic diseases. Our study revealed that dietary intake did not differ between OPEL and OPUS; thus, pointing to the role of longevity genes in protecting from disease among individuals with familial longevity.
CONCLUSION:
The offspring of long-lived parents do not differ in their dietary patterns compared to individuals without parental longevity.
KEYWORDS:
Diet; aging; longevity; nutrition 

 

It's better to have good genes no matter what your diet is like. It would be interesting to see the whole study, but on the face of it, long lived individuals have the same diet as shorter lived ones. Since longevity has an inheritance component, parental longevity individuals are a good proxy for long lived individuals. Now in any group of people, you will have those who are at the ends of the bell curve of diet - those with excellent diet and those with extra poor diet. Wouldn't you expect the ones with excellent diet to be overrepresented in the group of long lived people? Get good genes, is my advice.

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[mccoy]

Are those numbers accurate? Did they eat so little, even considering they were seniors? from 1120 to 1220 kcal, less than a typical CR diet?

The conclusion might be that seniors >65 years in CR displayed no difference... Also, the protein question, they didn't check that but we know protein quantity is told to be of importance after a certain age...

 

And why apparently, the descendants of longeve communities, like the Okinawans, lost their longevity after taking up the western junky diet? The situation appears to be more complex than simply genes, although in the outliers like Calment and Morano it is reasonable to think that they had an exceptional individual protection from senescense and degeneration, an extremely rare genetic combination which was active no matter what the diet was.

[Guest Steven MOO]

I suspect they are referring, if healthy diet is implemented for everyone, those with the long life elders > 100 years would probably gives sons and daughters of long life as part of the DNA as compared to those shorter lived elderly.

 

I do suspect they are also referring those parent with good looking or pretty face would give birth to a pretty boy or girl that is called genetic inheritance, as part of the answer to longevity in healthy aging concept. So with some of the inherited cancer genes that bring disease to the future generation.

 

However this discovery or research might make no sense because what we would like to see is, how people should live longer than the usual 100 years old, why not 200 years old or immortality with the 20 - 30 years old looks? This kind of research or discovery would definitely be a "big news" to everyone.

 

One of my own discovery is that "every part of our body" carries different expiry date that relates to aging.  Which first expiry part would come first to infect the other expiry part in certain way, as body parts connects each other, just like fresh fruit vs expired fruit vs fruit not put into a refrigerator, where things started to "spoil" or "damage" or unable to repair and maintain due to expiration first. For example, there is a machine breakdown as part of the production line. This machine definitely slow down other process. It also depends how importance of this machine. The more importance of this machine, the more impact to the production line. In our body, what machine deems important to us?

 

How do we maintain and repair it, that's what i am looking for.

 

Gene is about knowing what we have which is being a human species (which is nothing much to share about), diet is about what we are going to do about it.  It really takes time for me to discover things....anyway, hope to discover some more in future...