Flies that Choose a Poor Diet Have a Shorter Lifespan than those Forced into a Poor Diet

This interesting study shows that when given the choice to consume sugar or protein, flies consume a lot of sugar and exhibit reduced life span as a result. Feeding the same proportional mix of sugar and protein to flies without giving them the choice of what to consume does not reduce life span to the same degree, however. The researchers identify specific signaling responsible for this outcome, involved in the neuronal regulation of metabolism, a part of the only partially explored feedback loop between diet and appetite. This is all fascinating, but it is hard to say whether it has any near term relevance to health in humans. What constitutes a good diet remains a matter of continuous debate. The typical way of addressing such questions in a laboratory setting would be to compare groups given diets with different macronutrient compositions and measure their lifespans. But in real life, food is neither presented nor consumed that way. First, foods vary in their composition of macronutrients. Second, all creatures tend to have innate preferences towards certain foods. Taking these discrepancies into account, would we see a connection between macronutrients and longevity in a more naturalistic, choice-based food environment? Researchers set out to address this topic in a widely used model system, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In the first set of experiments, one group of wild-type fruit flies spent their lives on a diet consisting of equal amounts of ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs