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Medicine News
Restricted calorie diets prolong life!
Finally the research published in Science identified how cells protect themselves from stress, and how protein damage is avoided. It appeared that cells have damage-limiting mechanism which helps reduce consequences such as lack of proteins or cell death due to trauma, heat, or cold. This damage limiting reaction of cells s called heat shock response, and it was discovered that this reaction has another function: it protects cells from ageing.
To be precise, heat shock reaction in human cells is regulated by anti-ageing protein called SIRT1. However, the amount of SIRT1 decreases with ageing, and heat shock response is reduced. So, it is harder for older cells to cope with damage caused by stress.
So, this important study can explain how stress can be related to life span. It has been also discovered that not all kinds of stress are useful, only mild stress: it activates heat shock reaction, but does not make harm to cell proteins, as a serious stress does. So, a little bit of stress can really prolong life. The example of such stress is short-term calorie restricted diet.
"Now we know why the diets prolong life: it because of heat shock factor 1," says Westerheide, the researcher.
This interesting research has provided significant results, but the next point for researchers is to find out is this true for the whole organisms or only for separate cells they have tested.
