- A new study based at Salk Institute has discovered the cellular mechanisms behind calorie restriction.
- Rats on a higher-calorie diet experienced more inflammation and immune problems than rats that ate less.
- This research is especially relevant right now, as immunodeficient patients are at high risk of complications from COVID-19.
Finding kale and quinoa has never been easier than it is right now. Oreos and Spam, not so much.
We know about the toilet paper and hand sanitizer shortages. There are other problems. I've visited at least five grocers in the last week in my Los Angeles neighborhood, and the processed foods shelves are empty.
That problem is not only occurring here. Food giants like General Mills and Campbell Soup are experiencing sales gains between 10-20 percent. Popcorn, pretzels, and potato chips are even higher, between 30-48 sales increases over this time last year.
This is not the direction we should be moving in during a pandemic—or ever, but especially right now.
First, we must differentiate between processed foods and packaged goods. The latter is understandable: beans, pasta, rice, sauces—these too have been filling carts. The issue is "comfort foods," processed and packaged foodstuffs high in sugars and emulsifiers, which are selling at an even higher rate. At a time when we need our immune systems to be as healthy as possible, diet has never mattered more.
Emotional eating during such an unprecedented time is understandable, expectable even. We gravitate toward sugar- and carb-heavy foods when stressed. But for the sake of not only your health, but our overtaxed health care system, we all need to think more deeply about what we're putting into our bodies.
Salk scientists show how caloric restriction prevents negative effects of aging in cells
I've covered health for Big Think since 2012 and have read hundreds of studies concerning diet and fitness. Time and again, two methods appear to work best: closing your feeding window and calorie restriction. The former is usually packaged with the title "intermittent fasting," but really it's just about not eating from the moment you wake up until right before bed. Restricting your feeding window to 10 hours a day or less seems to bestow the greatest benefits; even 12 hours is beneficial. The majority of Americans eat over the course of 14 hours per day.
Calorie restriction is usually associated with the Singularity set as an anti-aging protocol, but don't be dissuaded by that crowd. Plenty of research has backed up the health benefits of reducing your caloric load. A new study from a team of collaborators from the US and China discusses why that is.
Published in the journal Cell, a team at Salk Institute's Gene Expression Laboratory in La Jolla (along with former Salk alumni now based in China) tested 56 rats over the course of nine months, age 18 months to 27 months. For comparison sake, that is the equivalent of tracking human diets from age 50 to 70.
The parameters are pretty simple: one group was given one caloric load, while the other was fed 30 percent fewer calories. The team then analyzed 168,703 cells from 40 different cell types, including cells from bone marrow, skin, brain, and muscle tissue.
Cells from rats on the calorie-restricted diet resembled young rats by the end of the study. A total of 57 percent of the aging changes in the non-restricted rats were not prevalent in the dieting group. Co-corresponding author Guang-Hui Liu (at the Chinese Academy of Sciences) breaks it down:
"This approach not only told us the effect of calorie restriction on these cell types, but also provided the most complete and detailed study of what happens at a single-cell level during aging."
Photo: Getty Images
The cells most affected by higher calorie intake include those linked to lipid metabolism as well as immunity and inflammation response. In fact, inflammation kept increasing in rat bingers. Chronic inflammation is one of the biggest consequences of the "Western diet," which negatively impacts a range of cancers and metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.
Even more urgent at this moment are the cytokine storms caused by COVID-19. While the virus is hitting elderly and immune-suppressed populations hardest, victims of every age group are experiencing this deadly inflammatory response. Whether or not diet is specifically related to COVID-19 is unknown, but we do know that two consequences of obesity are immune problems and inflammation. If you prime your body by eating foods that promote inflammation, you're going to have trouble fighting off disease.
Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, also a co-corresponding author on this paper, is hopeful that this research will open up new avenues of treatment.
"We already knew that calorie restriction increases life span, but now we've shown all the changes that occur at a single-cell level to cause that. This gives us targets that we may eventually be able to act on with drugs to treat aging in humans."
Never in history has it been so apparent that we're all in this together. Social media keeps us dialed in for constant updates. If a greater emphasis on our health care system (as well as individual health) is an outcome of this pandemic, we can at least chalk that up as one small victory.
Right now, of course, we need to focus on the most vulnerable populations. While we live through this, however, don't put yourself at risk of being in that population. Eat smarter, and eat less.
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His next book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
A close up of Bathynomus raksasa
Humanity knows surprisingly little about the ocean depths. An often-repeated bit of evidence for this is the fact that humanity has done a better job mapping the surface of Mars than the bottom of the sea. The creatures we find lurking in the watery abyss often surprise even the most dedicated researchers with their unique features and bizarre behavior.
A recent expedition off the coast of Java discovered a new isopod species remarkable for its size and resemblance to Darth Vader.
The ocean depths are home to many creatures that some consider to be unnatural.
Bathynomus raksasa specimen (left) next to a closely related supergiant isopod, B. giganteus (right)
Sidabalok CM, Wong HP-S, Ng PKL (ZooKeys 2020)
According to LiveScience, the Bathynomus genus is sometimes referred to as "Darth Vader of the Seas" because the crustaceans are shaped like the character's menacing helmet. Deemed Bathynomus raksasa ("raksasa" meaning "giant" in Indonesian), this cockroach-like creature can grow to over 30 cm (12 inches). It is one of several known species of giant ocean-going isopod. Like the other members of its order, it has compound eyes, seven body segments, two pairs of antennae, and four sets of jaws.
The incredible size of this species is likely a result of deep-sea gigantism. This is the tendency for creatures that inhabit deeper parts of the ocean to be much larger than closely related species that live in shallower waters. B. raksasa appears to make its home between 950 and 1,260 meters (3,117 and 4,134 ft) below sea level.
Perhaps fittingly for a creature so creepy looking, that is the lower sections of what is commonly called The Twilight Zone, named for the lack of light available at such depths.
It isn't the only giant isopod, far from it. Other species of ocean-going isopod can get up to 50 cm long (20 inches) and also look like they came out of a nightmare. These are the unusual ones, though. Most of the time, isopods stay at much more reasonable sizes.
The discovery of this new species was published in ZooKeys. The remainder of the specimens from the trip are still being analyzed. The full report will be published shortly.
What benefit does this find have for science? And is it as evil as it looks?
The discovery of a new species is always a cause for celebration in zoology. That this is the discovery of an animal that inhabits the deeps of the sea, one of the least explored areas humans can get to, is the icing on the cake.
Helen Wong of the National University of Singapore, who co-authored the species' description, explained the importance of the discovery:
"The identification of this new species is an indication of just how little we know about the oceans. There is certainly more for us to explore in terms of biodiversity in the deep sea of our region."
The animal's visual similarity to Darth Vader is a result of its compound eyes and the curious shape of its head. However, given the location of its discovery, the bottom of the remote seas, it may be associated with all manner of horrifically evil Elder Things and Great Old Ones.
On May 12, 2021, the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, announced five US$1 million lottery prizes for those who are vaccinated. Meanwhile, in West Virginia, younger citizens are being enticed to get the shot with $100 savings bonds, and a state university in North Carolina is offering students who get vaccinated a chance to win the cost of housing. Many companies are paying vaccinated employees more money through bonuses or extra paid time off.
The push to get as many people vaccinated as possible is laudable and may well work. But leading behavioral scientists are worried that paying people to vaccinate could backfire if it makes people more skeptical of the shots. And ethicists have argued that it would be wrong, citing concerns over fairness and equity.
As a behavioral scientist and ethicist, I draw on an extensive body of research to help answer these questions. It suggests that incentives might work to save lives and, if properly structured, need not trample individual rights or be a huge expense for the government.
In the United States, incentives and disincentives are already used in health care. The U.S. system of privatized health insurance exposes patients to substantial deductibles and copays, not only to cover costs but to cut down on what could be deemed as wasteful health care – the thinking being that putting a cost to an emergency room visit, for example, might deter those who aren't really in need of that level of care.
In practice, this means patients are encouraged to decline both emergency and more routine care, since both are exposed to costs.
Paying for health behaviors
In the case of COVID-19, the vaccines are already free to consumers, which has undoubtedly encouraged people to be immunized. Studies have shown that reducing out-of-pocket costs can improve adherence to life-sustaining drugs, whether to prevent heart attacks or to manage diabetes.
A payment to take a drug goes one step further than simply reducing costs. And if properly designed, such incentives can change health behaviors.
Payments and cash prizes have been shown effective in encouraging blood donations, adherence to blood thinner drugs, blood glucose monitoring, physical activity and smoking cessation.
And for vaccination in particular, payments have been successful for human papillomavirus (HPV) in England; hepatitis B in the United States and the United Kingdom; and tetanus toxoid in Nigeria. The effects can be substantial: For example, for one group in the HPV study, the vaccination rate more than doubled with an incentive.
For COVID-19, there are no field studies to date, but several survey experiments, including one my group conducted with 1,000 Americans, find that incentives are likely to work. In our case, the incentive of a tax break was enough to encourage those hesitant about vaccinations to say they would take the shot.
Coercion concerns
Even if incentives will save lives by increasing vaccinations, there are still other ethical considerations. A key concern is protecting the autonomous choices of people to decide what they put into their own bodies. This may be especially important for the COVID-19 vaccines, which – although authorized as likely safe and effective – are not yet fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
But already people are often paid to participate in clinical trials for drugs that have not yet been approved by the FDA. Ethicists have worried that such payments may be “coercive" if the money is so attractive as to override a person's free choices or make them worse off overall.
One can quibble about whether the term “coercion" applies to offers of payment. But even if offers were coercive, payments may still be reasonable to save lives in a pandemic if they succeed in greater levels of immunization.
During the smallpox epidemic nearly 100 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the power of states to mandate vaccines. Compared with mandating vaccination, the incentives to encourage vaccines seem innocuous.
Exploitation and paternalism
Yet some still worry. Bioethicists Emily Largent and Franklin Miller wrote in a recent paper that a payment might “unfairly" exploit “those U.S. residents who have lost jobs … or slipped into poverty during the pandemic," which could leave them feeling as if they have “no choice but to be vaccinated for cash." Others have noted that vaccine hesitancy is higher in nonwhite communities, where incomes tend to be lower, as is trust in the medical establishment.
Ethicists and policymakers should indeed focus on the poorest members of our community and seek to minimize racial disparities in both health outcomes and wealth. But there is no evidence that offering money is actually detrimental to such populations. Receiving money is a good thing. To suggest that we have to protect adults by denying them offers of money may come across as paternalism.
Some ethicists also argue that the money is better spent elsewhere to increase participation. States could spend the money making sure vaccines are convenient to everyone, for example, by bringing them to community events and churches. Money could also support various efforts to fight misinformation and communicate the importance of getting the shot.
The cost of incentives
Financial incentives could be expensive as a policy solution. As in Ohio, lottery drawings are one way to cap the overall cost of incentives while giving millions of people an additional reason to get their shot.
The tax code could also allow for a no-cost incentive for vaccination. Tax deductions and credits are often designed to encourage behaviors, such as savings or home ownership. Some states now have big budget surpluses and are considering tax relief measures. If a state announced now that such payments would be conditional on being vaccinated, then each person declining the shot would save the government money.
Ultimately, a well-designed vaccination incentive can help save lives and need not keep the ethicists up at night.
Christopher Robertson, Professor of Law, Boston University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
