A Day in the Life of...

This article in the NY Times details new research showing that the degenerative diseases due to aging are an anticancer strategy. In other words, your body has two choices, live as long as it can by gradually degenerating from oxidative damage and insults to your cellular DNA (biological form of "rust"), or die earlier from cancers due to proliferative stem cells. The body chooses the former. It shuts down stem cells the older they get. Likely, the repressor in question is linked to a signal transduction system that monitors cumulative DNA damage. As one of the authors pointed out, caloric restriction is proven to increase life span in mice (and it's been proven in other animals as well). Caloric restriction probably increases stress proteins that can repair or reverse some of the damage, but primarily, it works because the mitochondria in the cells don't have enough food to produce lots of ATP. If they don't have enough food, then they don't produce as much DNA damaging radicals as they normally would, lessening the cumulative damage to the nuclear DNA in each cell. Caloric restriction increases life span about 20-30%. You can fast every other day, or just reduce your caloric intake by a third, about 1300 Calories a day. Or, you can quit worrying about living a long life and enjoy the moment.