The Oldest Cure in the World by Steve Hendricks

Author:Steve Hendricks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

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* If the body runs too low on fat, it will return to burning proteins, including vital proteins like cardiac muscle. This change represents another metabolic switch: from fasting to starvation. Even slender people typically take a month or more to reach starvation, and the average padded American would take months.

CHAPTER 12

“A CRAZY IDEA WITH NO RELEVANCE”

In the early 1990s, a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles named Valter Longo waded into the backwater that was the study of aging and, after splashing around ineffectually for a spell, decided he and his colleagues were going about their work all wrong. At the time, the field of lifespan extension was still one of the more disparaged domains of the sciences. If there was a consensus about aging among researchers, it was that our genes largely determined our years, and we couldn’t do much about our genes. We might shorten our allotted span through bad behavior like smoking, or extend it a few years with exercise and a good diet, but nothing we did would push back the inevitable date with the undertaker by a decade or two.

Only a few scientists disagreed with this view strongly enough to stake a career on it. Carrying forward the work on caloric restriction by Clive McCay and colleagues, they had shown that eating less, provided nutrition was adequate, bestowed better health and substantially longer life on virtually every kind of lab animal: worms, flies, snails, fish, crabs, dogs, monkeys. One of the more prominent researchers in the field was an iconoclast named Roy Walford, in whose UCLA lab Valter Longo worked. Walford had marked his graduation from medical school in 1948 by casing the roulette wheels of Las Vegas and Reno, and upon discovering each wheel favored certain numbers over others, took the houses for enough cash to buy a yacht and sail the Caribbean for a year. (After Life and Time sketched his exploits, casinos took to shuffling the wheels around their parlors.) Walford once spent a sabbatical walking and hitchhiking across Africa, and another walking across India in a loincloth, stopping now and then to take the rectal temperature of yogis. Holy men, it turns out, are more chill than the rest of us.

When Longo first went to the Walford lab in 1992, it had no Walford. He was holed up for two years in the Arizona desert as the chief medical officer of Biosphere 2, three acres of interconnected glass structures meant to simulate a space colony. (Biosphere 1 was Earth.) When the terranauts, as the eight researchers inside Biosphere 2 styled themselves, had trouble growing enough food, Walford took the opportunity to conduct the first long-term experiment of caloric restriction in humans. The results were fantastic: the researchers’ blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, insulin, and blood sugar all reverted to levels not seen since adolescence. But the price was a mammoth hunger and plummeting morale, and when the terranauts at last emerged from their glass cage, they were a hangry and dispirited bunch.

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