Promoting health and longevity through diet: from model organisms to humans

Abstract

Reduced food intake, avoiding malnutrition, can ameliorate aging and aging-associated diseases in invertebrate model organisms, rodents, primates, and humans. Recent findings indicate that meal timing is crucial, with both intermittent fasting and adjusted diurnal rhythm of feeding improving health and function, in the absence of changes in overall intake. Lowered intake of particular nutrients rather than of overall calories is also key, with protein and specific amino acids playing prominent roles. Nutritional modulation of the microbiome can also be important, and there are long-term, including inter-generational, effects of diet. The metabolic, molecular, and cellular mechanisms that mediate both improvement in health during aging to diet and genetic variation in the response to diet are being identified. These new findings are opening the way to specific dietary and pharmacological interventions to recapture the full potential benefits of dietary restriction, which humans can find difficult to maintain voluntarily.

Figure 1

Dietary restriction increases healthy lifespan in diverse single-celled, invertebrate and vertebrate animals.

Figure 2

Dietary restriction modulates multiple systemic, neural and cellular mechanisms that improve health and combat the diseases of aging.

Figure 3

The effectors of dietary restriction, including timing of food intake, specific nutrients, especially proteins and particular amino acids, the gut microbiome and longer-term mechanisms including developmental programming and transgenerational effects, modulate key mechanisms associated with healthy aging.