I have occasionally complained about my mother in law’s bland cooking methods. Boiled this, steamed that. How about a sauté? How about frying something? And yet, she is aging gracefully and the scientific evidence has begun to justify her insipid cooking. A growing body of research shows that advanced glycation end products (AGEs) sit at…
Aging is often described as the slow accumulation of damage—oxidative stress, mitochondrial decline, epigenetic drift. But one of the most intriguing and increasingly central players in this process isn’t a metabolic byproduct or a failing repair system. It’s a piece of DNA that behaves like it still remembers being a virus. These sequences are called…
If we are to understand aging, the primary question is why should there be aging and death in the first place? Why is it almost universal in living organisms and what evolutionary purpose, if any, might aging and death serve? First let’s clarify that I don’t have any formal education in evolutionary biology, I think…
The two popular theories that purport to explain the obesity pandemic are the carbohydrate insulin model and the standard model of energy balance. In Why Nature Wants Us to be Fat, nephrologist Richard Johnson bravely proposes another theory: the survival switch. In his formulation, nature has evolved a survival mechanism allowing organisms to rapidly gain weight…
Muscle is a metabolically active tissue that plays a central role in health and longevity. Beyond functional roles such as helping one get up from a chair, going up stairs and avoiding falls as we age, muscle accounts for 75% of glucose disposal and makes the greatest contribution to resting energy expenditure of any tissue…
