The Mechanism of Aging
Natural foods are made of a wide variety of chemicals, some of which are damaging to our cells. Some of the chemicals are natural pesticides that plants use against animals.
Toxic Aging Theory: Aging is mostly caused by natural dietary poisons.
Prediction: less food = less poison = less aging
This prediction can be tested by starving some mice to see if they live longer. In fact, scientists do this experiment a lot. Almost every type of laboratory animal lives about 50% longer when it is starved to the limit. Starved mice are still breeding when the normally fed controls have passed away. In fact, they are more active, energetic, and maze-smarter throughout their lives. Note: most species of starved animals must get a vitamin supplement equal to the food they miss or they don't live as long.
https://www.afar.org/imported/Weindruch_DietaryRestriction.pdf
Experiments that starve animals to make them live longer are normally called caloric restriction experiments. Because of the suggestive name, most researchers are trying to discover why calories seem to cause aging. The proper name should be food restriction experiments, which would make researchers curious about the chemical makeup of food instead.
This study compares the most toxic synthetic chemicals with the most toxic natural chemicals in foods and finds them about equal:
Nature's chemicals and synthetic chemicals: Comparative toxicology
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC54832/pdf/pnas01044-0445.pdf
Because of this out-of-place, second-to-last sentence, the author became one of my heroes:
- Understanding why caloric restriction dramatically lowers cancer and mitogenesis rates and extends life-span in experimental animals (61,62) should also be a major research priority.
Do nature's toxic chemicals have something to do with the results of caloric restriction experiments? Toxic aging is not on the list of aging theories, and that study is the only place I've found even a hint of it.
The quote above documents that mitogenesis rates are reduced when animals are starved. Mitogenesis is the periodic cell divisions which take place in our tissues: When a cell is damaged beyond its limit, it creates a perfect copy of itself from the DNA blueprint and then suicides (apoptosis) to leave space for the new cell. Although this sounds like it should make us almost immortal, in fact most of our cells can divide only a predetermined number of times. After that the damaged cells just hang around waiting to die (called senescence) from accumulating damage. The rate of mitogenesis determines how soon our cells reach their limit of self-repair, so it is also the rate of aging. It can be slowed by reducing the amount of natural cell-damaging chemicals in the diet.
Because of the random cell damage and mitogenesis going on, some of a young adult's unluckiest cells have already reached senescence and died. Each organ's special functions are thus diminished, and since the immune system diminishes, the cellular damage accelerates as we age. Although it's possible to slow aging and boost vitality, don't expect anyone to actually reverse the aging process anytime soon. Not until technology can replace the cells lost to senescence.
https://mystic-sagery.com/hypothesis-generator.html?89,90The hypothesis generator only includes two individual foods and they don't make a good comparison. However, this screen-shot comparing carrots to mixed vegetables shows that they have opposite correlations with major health markers.
If we had a list of foods sorted by toxicity, we could increase our chances of aging slowly by avoiding foods at the top of the list. Such a list can be created with a large random survey about people's food choices, diseases, and health symptoms (aches, pains, energy, weight, acne, hair loss etc). The more statistical links found between foods and diseases/symptoms, the more toxic it is, roughly. Besides a food toxicity list, the survey data would allow the creation of a new resource similar to the hypothesis generator, but which lists health symptoms. Someone with a symptom could click a button to see a list of foods associated with it. They might find one of their favourite foods at the top of the list and be suddenly cured. This seems like a valuable resource to me, and is one of a few special projects I would like to accomplish if the resources were available.
Another way to slow aging is by eating a low variety diet. Low variety is optimal for our immune system's antibody defence, allowing it to focus better on a smaller number of toxin types. I wrote a javascript toxin/antibody simulator to measure it. The output suggests that reducing the number of toxin types in the diet by four, while keeping the number of toxin particles the same, should roughly half the cell damage. Provided that the minimum nutritional requirements are met, a low variety diet is almost certain to be advantageous to longevity. The only thing that could go wrong is if you unknowingly choose the most toxic foods as your staples.
Toxic Synergy Simulator
https://mystic-sagery.com/synergy.html
Playing with low variety diets is very dangerous at the present time, especially if you are the dedicated type of person who can live by them for long periods of time. Nutrient deficiencies and imbalances become more extreme as foods are removed from the diet. At the very least you'd want your diet analyzed by a computer app or nutritionist, and then you must accept the risk of focusing on a food that has a degenerative disease associated with it. Until we have a list of foods sorted from best to worst, and with their side-effects exposed, I wouldn't recommend a low variety diet.
Other approaches to a longevity diet are to detoxify foods with manufactured antibodies before eating them, or to build foods from purified ingredients. Cooking destroys some of the bad chemicals, so that's a way we already detoxify many foods.
Other factors of aging are nutritional deficiencies, radiation, injury, and a deficiency of free electrons (which causes inflammation) from spending too much time electrically insulated from ground. Anything that damages cells is a cause of aging.