A team of researchers from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging (USA) has carried out an experiment with flies whose conclusion is that dietary restriction causes a kind of “reprogramming” of the biological clock with a very positive achievement: lengthening the life . The study has been published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
According to the experiment with fruit flies, whose protein intake was reduced in their daily diet, this imposition increased the capacity of the insects’ circadian clocks and also improved their cycle of decomposition and synthesis of fat . This improvement in the fat metabolism process could explain why eating fewer calories leads to increased longevity in several species.
The scientists continued to experiment and when they disrupted the flies’ biological clock, both genetically and by external factors (subjecting them to light continuously), they found that the benefits of calorie restriction disappeared. In the same way, they made another surprising finding: by genetically altering the fruit flies to promote this improvement in fat management, the insects lived much longer even consuming all the food they wanted, without restriction.
This discovery, according to the study authors, could lead to a future drug that favors this beneficial effect of caloric restriction on our biological clock without the need for a severe diet; that is, we could be healthy without the need for demanding or restrictive diets. Considering that between 10 and 15% of our genome is controlled by the circadian clock , the resolution of this study is encouraging.
