Calorie Restriction Affects the Plasticity of Fat Tissue, Not Just the Amount of Fat Tissue

The practice of calorie restriction, a reduction of up to 40% below the usual ad libitum calorie intake, while still obtaining optimal levels of dietary micronutrients, is well known to slow aging and extend life in near all species and lineages tested to date. Calorie restriction produces sweeping changes in the operation of cellular metabolism, such as upregulation of a range of cellular stress responses, including the maintenance processes of autophagy. It also, however, has the obvious outcome of greatly reducing body fat, particularly the visceral fat that clusters around the organs of the abdomen. Visceral fat tissue is metabolically active and quite harmful over the long term, so there is always the question of the degree to which the benefits of calorie restriction derive from loss of fat tissue versus upregulated autophagy and the like, and how that balance is different between species. Visceral fat tissue creates chronic inflammation via a variety of mechanisms: cell signaling that is similar to the results of infection; the immune response to debris from dead fat cells; increased numbers of senescent cells in fat tissue. Chronic inflammation then accelerates the development and progression of all common age-related disease. We can see this in the epidemiology of the obese and overweight, as these individuals suffer a shorter life expectancy, a greater risk of age-related disease, and higher lifetime medical costs, with these disadvantages scaling in size wit...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs