Google Spinoff Offers Research on Link Between Diet, Aging

Daphne Koller, chief computing officer for Google-founded Calico Labs, announced at a CB Insights conference in San Francisco that she and her team had been studying what happens to mice on restricted diets. 

Business Insider reports that Koller explained limiting how many calories the mice consumed appeared to help with some measures of aging—a finding bolstered by a spate of recent studies in animals.

"Caloric restriction is the one intervention that's been repeatedly demonstrated to extend lifespan across multiple species," Koller told BI.

Researchers published the results of the first-ever clinical trial of caloric restriction in humans in the Journals of Gerontology. For that study, researchers randomly assigned roughly 200 non-obese people ages 21 to 51 to either eat as they normally did, or eat 25% fewer calories than usual, for two years.

By the study's end, the dieters had seen some hopeful health indicators, such as dips in cholesterol and blood pressure, and had more control over their blood sugar levels—no surprise. They also lost an average of 15 pounds, and kept it off—a positive finding that is rarely seen in weight-loss studies. 

The study was preliminary, and designed mostly to see whether people could stick to the diet in the first place. Eighty-two percent of the participants stayed with it for the full two years. 

Related:How Americans Can Incorporate Sustainability Into Their Diets

A September study published in the journal Nature found that monkeys that were on a diet had cells that appeared on average seven years younger than their actual age. The monkeys' diets had been restricted by 30% for two-thirds of their lives, starting when they were middle-aged. 

That study also found that the cells of mice who had eaten 40% fewer calories for nearly their entire lives appeared two years younger—a slightly more pronounced outcome when you consider the average lifespan of the monkeys is 35 years, versus two to three years for the mice. 

"Ultimately, what these studies show is that what you eat influences how you age, and it's not all bad news," said Rozalyn Anderson, an author of the latest paper, who leads an aging research program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 

This once again proves we are what we eat.