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The Forever Fly, The Forever Diet?
As humans, what is our ideal environment? “Not the industrial lifestyle with lots of sugar, lots of immobility, lots of stress, watching news programs, having your stock portfolio get fried by psychopaths on Wall Street. None of that is good for your health or survival—at any age.”
Instead, Rose advocates a diet of food that our ancestors were accustomed to thousands of years ago. Often referred to as the “Paleolithic diet”, it includes meat, fish, vegetables, fruits and nuts—food that’s not often a part of today’s preservative-ridden, over-processed cuisine. Winding back the clock back even more, the invention of agriculture alone isn’t part of human nature as biology intended it. For most of our existence, humans have had a diet that consists of natural foods (hence the “Caveman diet” nickname). According to Rose, natural selection has favored physiological adaptations that help us process those types of foods without developing diseases or disorders from them.
But within the last 10,000 years or so, we’ve shifted to an agricultural diet that includes milk and grains. Although 10,000 years isn’t very long relative to the span of human existence, we’ve had a few generations that were able to adapt to this “new” diet. Said Mueller, “Using this very general theory, our inference should be that natural selection works strongly to have young people adapt to this new diet and not have severe reactions to it, but because natural selection works so weakly when we’re old, it actually may not have had enough time to allow us older people to adapt to the agricultural diet.” It may be beneficial for us, as we get older, to follow a diet that’s more consistent with the diet to which our ancestors adapted.
A diet that rules out the instant gratification of fast food and the guilty pleasure of junk food and encourages more fresh fruits and vegetables would be beneficial, but Rose’s Paleo diet is based on more than just a reduction of caloric intake. It’s simply how natural selection works.
It may turn out that once natural selection makes a young person able to tolerate rice or wheat, that adaptation carries throughout your life, but if in fact there’s some age-specificity to your ability to tolerate that stuff, then maybe it’s not your case,” said Mueller. As children, we’re all raised on milk, as humans have been since the caveman days. Unlike us, however, our ancestors never had milk after they were weaned from their mothers.
Consequently, modern humans have evolved such that many of us lose the ability to digest milk as we get older. Rose’s natural immortality plan is a way that we can apply the knowledge gained from his and Rose’s research on aging to change current habits to benefit people today.
“Really, the diet is just the absence of the food products that are basically a novel invention of modern agriculture, however you define those. Twinkies, all that stuff,” said Mueller.
Is he about to start cooking like a caveman? “Although I believe in it, I love cheese too much. I love pasta.”
Rose’s “Recipe for Natural Immortality” begins with adopting the diet of a hunter-gatherer when you turn 35. The next step is to use the best of modern medicine to get you to the immortality plateau. Then, as time passes and technology continues to advance and becomes more available, use autologous tissue repair (a type of repair in which tissue is derived from your own body). This type of tissue replacement, used for the generation of skin graft tissue, corneal cells, heart muscle, and more, isn’t something that Rose personally works on, but is imperative to incorporate this therapy in a venture towards immortality. Think of the body like a vintage car. If you replace certain parts as the years go by, it can keep running indefinitely—a well-oiled machine. Finally, Rose advocates for “new-generation pharmaceuticals” as they become available in about ten years.
What sounds like the grounds for a new diet book may seem fairly disconnected to Rose’s fruit flies. But Rose insists it is the latest manifestation of his and Mueller’s constantly evolving research, all based on evidence gathered from the diminutive yet immensely dependable Drosophila.
As humans, what is our ideal environment? “Not the industrial lifestyle with lots of sugar, lots of immobility, lots of stress, watching news programs, having your stock portfolio get fried by psychopaths on Wall Street. None of that is good for your health or survival—at any age.”
Instead, Rose advocates a diet of food that our ancestors were accustomed to thousands of years ago. Often referred to as the “Paleolithic diet”, it includes meat, fish, vegetables, fruits and nuts—food that’s not often a part of today’s preservative-ridden, over-processed cuisine. Winding back the clock back even more, the invention of agriculture alone isn’t part of human nature as biology intended it. For most of our existence, humans have had a diet that consists of natural foods (hence the “Caveman diet” nickname). According to Rose, natural selection has favored physiological adaptations that help us process those types of foods without developing diseases or disorders from them.
But within the last 10,000 years or so, we’ve shifted to an agricultural diet that includes milk and grains. Although 10,000 years isn’t very long relative to the span of human existence, we’ve had a few generations that were able to adapt to this “new” diet. Said Mueller, “Using this very general theory, our inference should be that natural selection works strongly to have young people adapt to this new diet and not have severe reactions to it, but because natural selection works so weakly when we’re old, it actually may not have had enough time to allow us older people to adapt to the agricultural diet.” It may be beneficial for us, as we get older, to follow a diet that’s more consistent with the diet to which our ancestors adapted.
A diet that rules out the instant gratification of fast food and the guilty pleasure of junk food and encourages more fresh fruits and vegetables would be beneficial, but Rose’s Paleo diet is based on more than just a reduction of caloric intake. It’s simply how natural selection works.
It may turn out that once natural selection makes a young person able to tolerate rice or wheat, that adaptation carries throughout your life, but if in fact there’s some age-specificity to your ability to tolerate that stuff, then maybe it’s not your case,” said Mueller. As children, we’re all raised on milk, as humans have been since the caveman days. Unlike us, however, our ancestors never had milk after they were weaned from their mothers.
Consequently, modern humans have evolved such that many of us lose the ability to digest milk as we get older. Rose’s natural immortality plan is a way that we can apply the knowledge gained from his and Rose’s research on aging to change current habits to benefit people today.
“Really, the diet is just the absence of the food products that are basically a novel invention of modern agriculture, however you define those. Twinkies, all that stuff,” said Mueller.
Is he about to start cooking like a caveman? “Although I believe in it, I love cheese too much. I love pasta.”
Rose’s “Recipe for Natural Immortality” begins with adopting the diet of a hunter-gatherer when you turn 35. The next step is to use the best of modern medicine to get you to the immortality plateau. Then, as time passes and technology continues to advance and becomes more available, use autologous tissue repair (a type of repair in which tissue is derived from your own body). This type of tissue replacement, used for the generation of skin graft tissue, corneal cells, heart muscle, and more, isn’t something that Rose personally works on, but is imperative to incorporate this therapy in a venture towards immortality. Think of the body like a vintage car. If you replace certain parts as the years go by, it can keep running indefinitely—a well-oiled machine. Finally, Rose advocates for “new-generation pharmaceuticals” as they become available in about ten years.
What sounds like the grounds for a new diet book may seem fairly disconnected to Rose’s fruit flies. But Rose insists it is the latest manifestation of his and Mueller’s constantly evolving research, all based on evidence gathered from the diminutive yet immensely dependable Drosophila.
