6 ms·

Beyond Resveratrol: The Anti-Aging NAD Fad

57 points by jhartmann 11y ago

reasonattlm 11y ago
The fixation of people outside the scientific community on things like this is irrational. If it works out stupendously well? You get to live a couple of years longer, and suffer a tiny bit less age-related disease. The cost of that is billions in research. For the same amount of money, actual, serious rejuvenation of the double the remaining healthy life span following treatments type could be built in mice by following the SENS vision of repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging [1]. People should be chasing that dream. Inside the scientific community, it is completely rational from a short term career still have a job a few years from now perspective to be investigating metabolism and the end state of a disease/old metabolism and proposing drug candidates that might slightly alter the situation for the better. That is the proven path to getting grants awarded, to moving with the grain of the system that wants drug candidates based on metabolic alteration that do a little bit of good, and no-one really cares that you're tinkering with proximate causes, not root causes, trying to get a little bit more mileage out of a damaged engine rather than fixing the damage. It's a mess of perverse incentives. The only way to break out of the hole of misallocated funded (or at least misallocated if your goal is to effectively treat aging as a medical condition rather than, say, gain more data on the fine details of metabolism, or further your career within the system) is to bootstrap SENS therapies to the point of showing that you get far better results for far less funding, and with far less work. Fortunately this is starting to happen. See, for example: 1) amyloid clearance: http://www.uclb.com/news-and-events/news-post/potential-new-approach-to-the-treatment-of-systemic-amyloidosis http://www.uclb.com/news-and-events/news-post/potential-new-... 2) senescent cell clearance: http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2015/20150309agingcell.html http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2015/20150309agingcell.htm... 3) mitochondrial DNA damage bypass: http://www.gensight-biologics.com/index.php?page=mts http://www.gensight-biologics.com/index.php?page=mts There are others moving into startups for development; more senescent cell clearance at Oisin Biotech, clearance of metabolic waste products that contribute to atherosclerosis at Human Rejuvenation Technologies. And so on. Billions have been spent on the investigation of sirtuins and other excessively hyped alleged paths to ways to slightly, slightly slow down the aging process. They have gone nowhere, produced nothing beyond more knowledge of metabolism. It is well past time to accept that that game is broken, it's a path to nowhere other that the comprehensive mapping of cellular metabolism: very useful for the next generation of science, but not a road to extending healthy life and eliminating age-related frailty and disease. The only way to achieve that end is to repair the root causes of aging. For so long as the majority of the research community insists on metabolic tinkering that can in principle only achieve marginal results, progress to meaningful therapies will be slow. [1]: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  Actually, if these supplements do mitochondrial repair, then that's definitely one strand of SENS. Of course you still need the others.
- delinquentme 11y ago
  why doesn't this commend have upvote arrows?
  - JulianMorrison 11y ago
    You either already voted, or you haven't got enough Karma to vote. For some silly reason HN doesn't let you change or retract your vote.
anigbrowl 11y ago
fame in the mid-2000s for research on yeast and mice that suggested the red wine ingredient resveratrol mimics anti-aging effects of calorie restriction. Far be it from me to preach to anyone else about their health maintenance strategies, but I can't help noticing that you can enjoy all the apparent benefits of caloric restriction by simple expedient of limiting your food intake and engaging in periodic fasting. People seem obsessed with the ability to have their cake and eat it, rather than put up with feeling hungry some of the time.
- hughw 11y ago
  Why would anyone put up with feeling hungry any of the time, if you could get similar benefits without doing so? For the character building experience of it?
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    How would anyone know if you could get the same thing as some other thing when you can only do one?
  - jerf 11y ago
    For years, I assumed the same thing, that "fasting" meant experiencing significant hunger. I always associated it with going entirely without food for some vague amount of time that was probably some consecutive number of days. But three weeks ago, after some Googling, I began what is called 'intermittent fasting'. Since it's only been three weeks, all I can say personally about the benefits is that I'm still doing it and have no plans to stop in the future, but I can say that by the third day, the hunger issue was negligible. The first Google result on the term is pretty good: http://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting http://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fa... At its simplest, for men it means eating all your food for the day in a roughly eight-hour window, often noon to 8pm. (There is apparently some scientific thought that women may have significantly different needs; I really can't speak to that.) In practical terms, this translates to "skipping breakfast" and avoiding midnight snacks. This turns out not to be that difficult, but has definitely had an positive impact on me, so far. Discomfort-wise for me, I tend to get a bit of a rumbly tummy around 10am, but generally it subsides pretty quickly and even by 11am I can easily go for another couple of hours without even thinking about lunch if I get busy. It is far from constant hunger. (But I won't lie and say it's zero... just, negligible. Literally. It can easily be neglected and it will in fact go away.) I can also say that I'm hardly watching the clock in the evening and trying to judge whether it's the crack of 8pm yet or not... I often eat at noon-thirty or 1pm and then dinner at 6pm and am done thinking about food for the day, without any willpower expended. It just happens. I say this mostly to point out to people that there is something to investigate that they may have misconceptions about, as I did. I will fully and up-front admit once again I am not in a position to extol its benefits particularly. (I like to do something like this for at least a couple of years before I do that.) (But I will go slightly out on a limb and say that I would not be all that surprised to discover that "intermittent fasting" has somewhere between 80-120% of the benefit of the scientifically-studied high caloric-restriction diets, with much lower willpower and discomfort costs. It turns out that if you dig into those, we've really only studied "normal (modern) diet", "heavily calorically restricted", and sometimes a particularly unrealistic fasting schedule (see link), so if you're interested in a point in the middle of the two we've studied, you're sort of scientifically on your own. Hence the possibility I cite of 120%; currently it would fit the two data points we have just fine for it to turn out that "caloric restriction" isn't the optimum and is in fact overshooting.)
doublerebel 11y ago
Submarine article? Looks to point pretty hard to Elysium Health. Kurzweil wrote on this topic in 2013 [1]. Nobody seems to mention that the NAD precursor NR is a Vitamin B3 variant, that would make it seem less special. It does seem to have unique properties, Examine.com states [2]: Nicotinamide riboside is a relatively new form of Vitamin B3 supplementation that appears to be active following oral ingestion in animals Seems like exercise recovery is the most likely benefit. Improved cognition less likely. Interesting enough to not completely brush aside... The chief scientist at Elysium states his daily supplements are Elysium's product, Vitamin D and Aspirin [3]. The latter two are well supported by research. [1]: http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-new-and-reversible-cause-of-aging http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-new-and-reversible-cause-of-agin... [2]: http://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-b3/#summary1-2 http://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-b3/#summary1-2 [3]: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/blog/qa-with-elysium-co-founder-and-chief-scientist-leonard-guarente http://www.elysiumhealth.com/blog/qa-with-elysium-co-founder... EDIT: brain switched Aspirin, it's late here.
- mrob 11y ago
  [3] states he takes aspirin, not ibuprofen: "I take BASIS, as well as vitamin D (2500 IU daily) and aspirin (82 mg daily)."
ForkFed 11y ago
> Whenever I see my 10-year-old daughter brimming over with so much energy that she jumps up in the middle of supper to run around the table, I think to myself, "those young mitochondria." Best first sentence introducing a scientific text, as far as I can remember ... But I challenge you - got something more intriguing?

57 points by jhartmann 11y ago

The fixation of people outside the scientific community on things like this is irrational. If it works out stupendously well? You get to live a couple of years longer, and suffer a tiny bit less age-related disease. The cost of that is billions in research. For the same amount of money, actual, serious rejuvenation of the double the remaining healthy life span following treatments type could be built in mice by following the SENS vision of repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging [1]. People should be chasing that dream. Inside the scientific community, it is completely rational from a short term career still have a job a few years from now perspective to be investigating metabolism and the end state of a disease/old metabolism and proposing drug candidates that might slightly alter the situation for the better. That is the proven path to getting grants awarded, to moving with the grain of the system that wants drug candidates based on metabolic alteration that do a little bit of good, and no-one really cares that you're tinkering with proximate causes, not root causes, trying to get a little bit more mileage out of a damaged engine rather than fixing the damage. It's a mess of perverse incentives. The only way to break out of the hole of misallocated funded (or at least misallocated if your goal is to effectively treat aging as a medical condition rather than, say, gain more data on the fine details of metabolism, or further your career within the system) is to bootstrap SENS therapies to the point of showing that you get far better results for far less funding, and with far less work. Fortunately this is starting to happen. See, for example: 1) amyloid clearance: http://www.uclb.com/news-and-events/news-post/potential-new-approach-to-the-treatment-of-systemic-amyloidosis http://www.uclb.com/news-and-events/news-post/potential-new-... 2) senescent cell clearance: http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2015/20150309agingcell.html http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2015/20150309agingcell.htm... 3) mitochondrial DNA damage bypass: http://www.gensight-biologics.com/index.php?page=mts http://www.gensight-biologics.com/index.php?page=mts There are others moving into startups for development; more senescent cell clearance at Oisin Biotech, clearance of metabolic waste products that contribute to atherosclerosis at Human Rejuvenation Technologies. And so on. Billions have been spent on the investigation of sirtuins and other excessively hyped alleged paths to ways to slightly, slightly slow down the aging process. They have gone nowhere, produced nothing beyond more knowledge of metabolism. It is well past time to accept that that game is broken, it's a path to nowhere other that the comprehensive mapping of cellular metabolism: very useful for the next generation of science, but not a road to extending healthy life and eliminating age-related frailty and disease. The only way to achieve that end is to repair the root causes of aging. For so long as the majority of the research community insists on metabolic tinkering that can in principle only achieve marginal results, progress to meaningful therapies will be slow. [1]: http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

JulianMorrison 11y ago
Actually, if these supplements do mitochondrial repair, then that's definitely one strand of SENS. Of course you still need the others.
delinquentme 11y ago
why doesn't this commend have upvote arrows?
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  You either already voted, or you haven't got enough Karma to vote. For some silly reason HN doesn't let you change or retract your vote.

anigbrowl 11y ago

fame in the mid-2000s for research on yeast and mice that suggested the red wine ingredient resveratrol mimics anti-aging effects of calorie restriction. Far be it from me to preach to anyone else about their health maintenance strategies, but I can't help noticing that you can enjoy all the apparent benefits of caloric restriction by simple expedient of limiting your food intake and engaging in periodic fasting. People seem obsessed with the ability to have their cake and eat it, rather than put up with feeling hungry some of the time.

hughw 11y ago
Why would anyone put up with feeling hungry any of the time, if you could get similar benefits without doing so? For the character building experience of it?
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  How would anyone know if you could get the same thing as some other thing when you can only do one?
- jerf 11y ago
  For years, I assumed the same thing, that "fasting" meant experiencing significant hunger. I always associated it with going entirely without food for some vague amount of time that was probably some consecutive number of days. But three weeks ago, after some Googling, I began what is called 'intermittent fasting'. Since it's only been three weeks, all I can say personally about the benefits is that I'm still doing it and have no plans to stop in the future, but I can say that by the third day, the hunger issue was negligible. The first Google result on the term is pretty good: http://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting http://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fa... At its simplest, for men it means eating all your food for the day in a roughly eight-hour window, often noon to 8pm. (There is apparently some scientific thought that women may have significantly different needs; I really can't speak to that.) In practical terms, this translates to "skipping breakfast" and avoiding midnight snacks. This turns out not to be that difficult, but has definitely had an positive impact on me, so far. Discomfort-wise for me, I tend to get a bit of a rumbly tummy around 10am, but generally it subsides pretty quickly and even by 11am I can easily go for another couple of hours without even thinking about lunch if I get busy. It is far from constant hunger. (But I won't lie and say it's zero... just, negligible. Literally. It can easily be neglected and it will in fact go away.) I can also say that I'm hardly watching the clock in the evening and trying to judge whether it's the crack of 8pm yet or not... I often eat at noon-thirty or 1pm and then dinner at 6pm and am done thinking about food for the day, without any willpower expended. It just happens. I say this mostly to point out to people that there is something to investigate that they may have misconceptions about, as I did. I will fully and up-front admit once again I am not in a position to extol its benefits particularly. (I like to do something like this for at least a couple of years before I do that.) (But I will go slightly out on a limb and say that I would not be all that surprised to discover that "intermittent fasting" has somewhere between 80-120% of the benefit of the scientifically-studied high caloric-restriction diets, with much lower willpower and discomfort costs. It turns out that if you dig into those, we've really only studied "normal (modern) diet", "heavily calorically restricted", and sometimes a particularly unrealistic fasting schedule (see link), so if you're interested in a point in the middle of the two we've studied, you're sort of scientifically on your own. Hence the possibility I cite of 120%; currently it would fit the two data points we have just fine for it to turn out that "caloric restriction" isn't the optimum and is in fact overshooting.)

doublerebel 11y ago

Submarine article? Looks to point pretty hard to Elysium Health. Kurzweil wrote on this topic in 2013 [1]. Nobody seems to mention that the NAD precursor NR is a Vitamin B3 variant, that would make it seem less special. It does seem to have unique properties, Examine.com states [2]: Nicotinamide riboside is a relatively new form of Vitamin B3 supplementation that appears to be active following oral ingestion in animals Seems like exercise recovery is the most likely benefit. Improved cognition less likely. Interesting enough to not completely brush aside... The chief scientist at Elysium states his daily supplements are Elysium's product, Vitamin D and Aspirin [3]. The latter two are well supported by research. [1]: http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-new-and-reversible-cause-of-aging http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-new-and-reversible-cause-of-agin... [2]: http://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-b3/#summary1-2 http://examine.com/supplements/vitamin-b3/#summary1-2 [3]: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/blog/qa-with-elysium-co-founder-and-chief-scientist-leonard-guarente http://www.elysiumhealth.com/blog/qa-with-elysium-co-founder... EDIT: brain switched Aspirin, it's late here.

mrob 11y ago
[3] states he takes aspirin, not ibuprofen: "I take BASIS, as well as vitamin D (2500 IU daily) and aspirin (82 mg daily)."

ForkFed 11y ago

> Whenever I see my 10-year-old daughter brimming over with so much energy that she jumps up in the middle of supper to run around the table, I think to myself, "those young mitochondria." Best first sentence introducing a scientific text, as far as I can remember ... But I challenge you - got something more intriguing?