Research suggests optimal time of day to consume longevity-supporting supplements
University of Waterloo (Ontario), March 24, 2021
Aging is a disease that can be fought with the appropriate combinations of supplements and behaviours, according to new research from the University of Waterloo.
Using a comprehensive mathematical model, the researchers also found that the best time of day for someone to take these supplements depends on their age. Some anti-aging supplements should be taken by young people at night, while older people should take it midday for the greatest effectiveness.
The two classes of drugs the researchers modelled are nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) and Resveratrol, which have been the subject of increased interest in recent years after reports emerged on their benefits on metabolism and increased lifespan of various organisms.
A debate over whether to classify aging as a disease has been ongoing for decades, with the vast majority in the field of aging research now classifying it as such. As recently as 2015, a team of international scientists authored a paper calling it "time to classify biological aging as a disease"--and the World Health Organization has made moves that bring it closer to that definition.
"It's really important to try and change this wrong paradigm that aging is not treatable," said Mehrshad Sadria, a PhD student in Waterloo'sDepartment of Applied Mathematics. "We shouldn't think like 30 years ago when we thought that once a person gets into their 70s or 80s, they must be lethargic and ailing.
The clear association of aging with various serious diseases is a stronger motivator for better understanding aging, Sadria said. Recognizing aging as a disease can encourage investment and promote research efforts in identifying therapies that can delay the aging process.
"We can take these drugs that can extend our lifespan and improve our health. This study is the first step in understanding when is the best time for young people and older folks to take these supplements."
Sadria and Anita Layton, professor of Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Pharmacy and Biology at Waterloo, developed a mathematical model that simulates the circadian clock and metabolism in the mouse liver. The model is age-specific and can simulate liver function in a young mouse or an aged mouse.
They found that a young person, for example, should take NMN six hours after they wake up to achieve the highest efficiency. On the other hand, young individuals should take Resveratrol at night while older people should take it midday for the greatest effectiveness.
"The time you eat, what you eat, the time you sleep and the time you exercise are all factors that can affect your body, how you age and how you live," Layton said. "People should be mindful of when they eat and ensure that it coincides with other things in their environment that impact their sleep/wake cycle or body clock, such as exposure to light because if not, it could cause conflict within the body."
The study, Modeling the Effect of Ageing on the Circadian Clock and Metabolism: Implications on Timing of Medication, was recently published in the journal iScience.
Sugar not so nice for your child's brain development
New research shows how high consumption affects learning, memory
University of Georgia, April 1, 2021
Sugar practically screams from the shelves of your grocery store, especially those products marketed to kids.
Children are the highest consumers of added sugar, even as high-sugar diets have been linked to health effects like obesity and heart disease and even impaired memory function.
However, less is known about how high sugar consumption during childhood affects the development of the brain, specifically a region known to be critically important for learning and memory called the hippocampus.
New research led by a University of Georgia faculty member in collaboration with a University of Southern California research group has shown in a rodent model that daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages during adolescence impairs performance on a learning and memory task during adulthood. The group further showed that changes in the bacteria in the gut may be the key to the sugar-induced memory impairment.
Supporting this possibility, they found that similar memory deficits were observed even when the bacteria, called Parabacteroides, were experimentally enriched in the guts of animals that had never consumed sugar.
"Early life sugar increased Parabacteroides levels, and the higher the levels of Parabacteroides, the worse the animals did in the task," said Emily Noble, assistant professor in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences who served as first author on the paper. "We found that the bacteria alone was sufficient to impair memory in the same way as sugar, but it also impaired other types of memory functions as well."
Guidelines recommend limiting sugar
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a joint publication of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and of Health and Human Services, recommends limiting added sugars to less than 10 percent of calories per day.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show Americans between the ages 9-18 exceed that recommendation, the bulk of the calories coming from sugar-sweetened beverages.
Considering the role the hippocampus plays in a variety of cognitive functions and the fact the area is still developing into late adolescence, researchers sought to understand more about its vulnerability to a high-sugar diet via gut microbiota.
Juvenile rats were given their normal chow and an 11% sugar solution, which is comparable to commercially available sugar-sweetened beverages.
Researchers then had the rats perform a hippocampus-dependent memory task designed to measure episodic contextual memory, or remembering the context where they had seen a familiar object before.
"We found that rats that consumed sugar in early life had an impaired capacity to discriminate that an object was novel to a specific context, a task the rats that were not given sugar were able to do," Noble said.
A second memory task measured basic recognition memory, a hippocampal-independent memory function that involves the animals' ability to recognize something they had seen previously.
In this task, sugar had no effect on the animals' recognition memory.
"Early life sugar consumption seems to selectively impair their hippocampal learning and memory," Noble said.
Additional analyses determined that high sugar consumption led to elevated levels of Parabacteroides in the gut microbiome, the more than 100 trillion microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract that play a role in human health and disease.
To better identify the mechanism by which the bacteria impacted memory and learning, researchers experimentally increased levels of Parabacteroides in the microbiome of rats that had never consumed sugar. Those animals showed impairments in both hippocampal dependent and hippocampal-independent memory tasks.
"(The bacteria) induced some cognitive deficits on its own," Noble said.
Noble said future research is needed to better identify specific pathways by which this gut-brain signaling operates.
"The question now is how do these populations of bacteria in the gut alter the development of the brain?" Noble said. "Identifying how the bacteria in the gut are impacting brain development will tell us about what sort of internal environment the brain needs in order to grow in a healthy way."
