Dr. David Sinclair

And those rats lived 30% longer.

But then it went away.

And then it came back in the 2000s in a big way when a couple of things happened.

One is that my lab and others showed that there are longevity genes in the body that come on and protect us from aging and disease.

The group of genes that I work on are called sirtuins.

There's seven of them.

And we showed in 2005 in a science paper that

If you have low levels of insulin and another molecule called insulin-like growth factor, those low levels turn on the longevity genes.

One of them that's really important is called SIRT1.

But by having high levels of insulin all day, being fed means your longevity genes are not switched on.

So you're falling apart.

Your epigenome, your information that keeps your cells functioning over time just degrades quicker.

Your clock is ticking faster by always being fed.

The other thing that I think might be happening by always having food around is that it's not allowing the cell to have periods of rest and reestablish the epigenome.

And so it also is accelerating in that direction.

There's plenty of other reasons as well that are not as profound, such as having low levels of glucose in your body will trigger your major muscles in your brain to become more sensitive to insulin and suck the glucose out of your bloodstream, which is very good.

You don't want to have glucose flowing around too much.

And that will ward off type 2 diabetes.

What is the protocol that people can extrapolate from that?

Well, if there's one thing I could say, I would say definitely try to skip a meal a day.