第三十九篇Eat to Live为了活着吃饭.doc

第十六篇 Eat to Live 为生存而食 A meager diet may give you health and long life, but it’s not much fun — and it might not even be necessary. We may be able to hang on to most of that youthful vigor even if we don’t start to diet until old age. 粗茶淡饭或许能给你健康和长寿，但这并不有趣——很有可能也没必要。即便在年老以后才 开始节食我们也能在很大程度上保持住青春活力。 Stephen Spindler and his colleagues from the University of California at Riverside have found that some of an elderly mouse’s liver genes can be made to behave as they did when the mouse was young simply by limiting its food for four weeks. The genetic rejuvenation won’t reverse other damage caused by time for the mouse, but could help its liver metabolize drugs or get rid of toxins. 加州大学Riverside分校的斯蒂芬?斯潘德尔及其同事发现，只要连续四周限制一些衰老的老 鼠进食，它们的肝脏基因就会变得和衰老前一样充满活力。虽然老鼠的肝部基因恢复活力不会逆 转它们在其他方面的老化，但是却有助于这些老鼠的肝脏对药物的新陈代谢和清除毒素。 Spindler’s team fed three mice a normal diet for their whole lives, and fed another three on half-rations3. Three more mice were switched from the normal diet to half-feed3 for a month when they were 34 months old — equivalent to about 70 human years. 斯潘德尔的队员们一直给其中的三只老鼠正常量的饲料，而给另外三只老鼠正常量饲料的一半，给三只34个月大的老鼠（相当于人类年龄的70岁）喂了一个月的半量饲料，之前这三只老鼠 的饲料量是正常的。 The researchers checked the activity of 11,000 genes from the mouse livers, and found that 46 changed with age in the normally fed mice. The changes were associated with things like inflammation and free radical production一 probably bad news for mouse health. In the mice that had dieted all their lives,27 of those 46 genes continued to behave like young genes. But the most surprising finding was that the mice that only started dieting in old age also benefited from 70 per cent of these gene changes. 研究者们检查了这些老鼠肝脏的11,000种基因的活性，发现正常饲养的老鼠有46种基因随 年龄的改变而改变。这些改变都与体内自由基的产生有关——这对老鼠的健康来说不是什么好消息。而对于那些终身都在节食的老鼠来说，那46种基因中的27种仍然继续保持着青春活力。但 是最令人吃惊的发现却是那些只是在老年时期节食的老鼠们受益于70%的基因变异。 This is the first indication that these effects kick in pretty quickly,” says Huber Warner from the National Institute on Aging near Washington D. C. No one yet kno