on this episode I discuss what is evolutionary biology and evolutionary biologists view of a healthier and longer life and if the Paleo diet is best for us as we age welcome to anti-aging hats on this podcast I interview top experts in anti-aging and longevity and we discuss the best natural and medical solutions to bring you practical advice you can apply right now to fight back against aging we also discuss sneak peeks at some huge scientific advancements coming in the near future that will allow us to age backwards I am your host for Roz Colin thank you for spending some time with me today my guest today is Michael Rose distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Irvine he has a fascinating way of approaching aging and we get to discuss some of his experiments I'm glad to have him on the show today all right Michael I'm excited to be talking with you welcome to the anti-aging hacks podcast thank you happy to be here so let's start with a little bit of your background where did you go to school and how did you get interested in the science of Aging so I did two degrees at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario Canada and Canadian and then in 1976 I went to England to do my PhD and my advisors wanted me to do a PhD on Aging so I did I was twenty-one years old at the time and I of course felt that I was personally immortal that was my emotional feeling right yeah wasn't what I have actually believed and therefore I was not interested in the subject but they spent a year and a half persuading me from 1975 to 1976 and they finally succeeded what led you to dive in did you have some really good mentors or folks that you worked with oh yeah I had two men who would later become fellows the Royal by John Maynard Smith between 1960 and 2000 was one of the leading biologists in England regardless of field and Bryan charlesworth who eventually became a rel Society professor at Edinburgh and he is one of the most brilliant and important biologists of the last 40 years well that's great company and I would say that you're up there yourself so don't sell yourself short you're a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of california-irvine which is pretty close to me so I'm definitely coming to grab lunch or coffee with you soon could you describe to the listeners what evolutionary biology is well evolutionary biology is at the other end of biology from molecular biology evolutionary biology is concerned with the deep long-term mechanisms that produce life underlie life shape life in all of its aspects most of the ideas in evolutionary biology are more general than the biochemistry is characteristic of our planet the idea is that evolutionary biology will be just as applicable to a silicon-based life-form it's a carbon-based life form it's the most mathematical part of biology it is the most controversial part of biology it has been since it was founded in 1800 not by Charles Darwin by jean-baptiste Lamarck a French guy and it's been my intellectual home for you know something like 50 years and it's certainly been one of the biggest passions in my life for almost as long fascinating so let's cover natural selection quickly for the audience that the mini refresher natural selection is a process where organisms or animals with favorable traits or genes are more likely to produce offspring especially in times of duress or stress or hardship when they reproduce they pass on these favorable traits to the next generation who's then better equipped to deal with whatever hardship life is throwing at them I have heard you say that natural selection is very strong before the start of reproduction and once reproduction starts the force of natural selection goes down until the end of reproduction and then stays flat could you explain that a bit more to the audience well firstly by way of background this was a mathematical finding of another great evolutionary biologist William Hamilton he did that math in 1966 it's not a verbal concept in his hands it had been for the preceding twenty five years it was a verbal concept in the hands of JBS Haldane Peter Medawar and George C Williams three more great evolution wellness but Hamilton actually converted into math and he pretty much showed that the force of natural selection acting on survival fell once reproduction starts in a population and it falls all the way down to zero at or shortly before the time at which reproduction stops in a population and then it remains flat at zero forever after the core theories that I have worked from are all derived from mathematics at first the mathematics of Hamilton and Charles worth Charlesworth added explicit genetics to Hamilton's model which was not explicitly genetic in the 1970s and halfway through that process he acquires me as his graduate student and my job is to take Charles Worth's genetic version of Hamilton's mathematics and do experiments based on on that genetic version of Hamilton's theory does that mean when you say the force of natural selection is very strong does that mean that when you're younger before you reproduce for humans let's say before high school 16 years old that nature is ruthless and weeding out the weak how would you describe the force is strong I think it's literally the best way to think of this is in terms of a gene that kills you with complete certainty and just one copy of the gene is enough if that gene kills you before the start of reproduction that gene has eliminated itself from a population a Dean that is just as deadly but doesn't kill until after every member of the population has finished reproducing that gene has no effect on its making the next generation in other words its lethal effect is not selected against and in between the start of reproduction and the end of reproduction the impact of the lethality of that gene steadily Falls quantitatively in a way which can be defined examined and extended mathematically I understand so if a gene or natural selection kills you before you're able to have kids then the force is very strong and the longer that it waits to kill you after you've had the chance to reproduce the weaker its effective so you did an experiment where you progressively raised the lifespan of fruit flies and I think you've been doing it since the 1970s would you please explain that experiment and were you right now but this is the most elegant experiment I'm pretty well known for it this experiment involves very simply the following reasoning if Hamilton's model is correct and that the force of natural selection doesn't fall until the start of reproduction and if that fall is the sole sufficient and necessary cause of Aging evolutionarily then all we have to do to slow and even delay the onset of aging is to shift the first stage of reproduction to later ages then the math behind the theory says well then if you have genetic variation in a population then over subsequent generations lifespan should progressively increase due to the evolutionary postponement of aging would you have to do that for specific individuals or for everybody in the species everybody in a population and would take presumably generations to achieve the longevity that we're talking about here right so one of the reasons why I had to do this experiment on the sly without even telling my advisor is he didn't think it would work but fortunately he went away on sabbatical in the United States we were I was doing all this my PhD in England and I was left by myself for a year and I said the hell with this I'm gonna start this experiment on top of all experiments I was doing and within just about a dozen generations it worked and you got a statistically detectable increase in average lifespan in the populations I was looking that is fascinating so near-term obviously it's great to know this near German would not help humanity but that's just a great finding that you found in your view what is aging aging is the loss of adaptation with age so adaptation refers to the your capacity to survive and reproduce successfully so physicians tend to focus almost entirely on your capacity to survive but if you add in the reproductive part you then are adding in all your functions like you know cognition ability to produce gametes in the case of mammals mammalian females the ability to take fertilized SCI goats and grow them up inside your uterus and then take care of your offspring once they emerge from your body so once you add reproduction to the survival part you're really talking about every aspect of the body that works the only reason your body does anything good is because of adaptation built into your genome or more precisely the information required for your genome to make your cells and thus your body work properly so that you can survive and reproduce right and is that the primary function of nature is to get us produce and after which were pretty much useless well that's what the math suggests and that's what I'm afraid unfortunately more than 40 years of experiments suggest you also say that we can influence the rate of aging through our diet and you've done specific experiments to prove some of this what did you learn about the role of diet through your experiments so firstly they aren't my experiments are the experiments of Grant Rutledge my former doctoral student who now works for the USDA don't be about and on the essential intuition derives again from Hamilton's basic force of natural selection concept when you combine it with environmental change whatever the cause so because the force of natural selection is very strong in the early part of life into the early adult ages if you have an environmental change that's sustained children and young adults will adapt that environmental change over a number generations far faster than older adults will because older adults with older adults the force of natural selection is very weak so a simple way to understand this is to say if you're looking at a population that has been in a new environment for dozens to hundreds of generations then the younger individuals will be far better adapted simply to the environmental change than older individuals and that gets added on top of the normal pattern of aging that arises simply because natural selection focuses on the young rather than the old always so humans are an example of a species that has undergone a major environmental change anywhere from a hundred years ago or two about say two hundred years ago case of aboriginal populations of Australasia to 10,000 ish generations for the populations of Western Asia and north eastern Asia that means that in the populations that have long lived under agricultural conditions like most of the populations of Eurasia we expect young people to be well adapted to an organic agricultural diet but we expect from the theory that individuals at much later ages suffer from both regular aging and lack of adaptation to this environmental change even though we've been doing agriculture for a long time it's still considered a newer diet so the newer diets that we have do not serve us well in fact if anything they make us age faster after reproduction or after a certain age yes exactly and now that's on organic agricultural diets the diets of the last century or so high fructose corn syrup vegetables seed oils will be other favorite examples well artificial sweeteners all the you know when you buy a packaged food heavily processed food and you read the ingredients and you start to get into a whole bunch of chemicals that's food that no one is adapted to you know so the Red Bull and Twinkie diet that so many American college undergraduates are so fond of completely toxic for everyone at every age now when you're young you're just better off it's you by being a completely crappy diet we'd also especially Grant Rutledge has done experiments on this effect too and he has shown that at every age a diet that a population is never adapted to in evolutionary time so a diet that's been around for like a generation or three is a diet that's toxic for everybody but that's I think the scientific basis for the advice that you should only heat things that your grandmother ate that's no longer strictly correct but for younger people because their grandparents might have had a crappy tie to their great great grandparents certainly I mean everybody who was eating food in the 19th century was Nighy ting industrial foods that really started to be invented in the late 19th century and only adopted on a mass basis in the 20th century kradic so I believe in the experiments that mr. Rutledge did there is he demarcated three different types of diets one is one as the really old diet which would correspond to the Paleolithic diet or that era then there's the agricultural period of the last eight to ten thousand years which was replicated in a different way and then what you just mentioned is this junk food diet which is fairly new it's 50 30 40 50 years old with all of those you're saying the junk food dyes are just bad across the board because we are not accustomed to that in any way shape or form but with the other two diets is the beginning of life so the first 30 40 50 years we're okay eating either way meaning paleo diets or agricultural grains and beans and legumes and then at some point we should shift back to to the older paleo diets yes that's a nice summary of the findings yes okay and you're I assume you are obviously following the Paleo diet at this point yes I'm so old I just don't have any real adaptation to thank cultural dies you look super young I don't know if it's the lighting but you don't have a wrinkle on your forehead my I have wrinkles on my forehead you just it's just bad lighting huh okay at what age Michael did you switch over to the Paleo diet um well it's interesting because I started to show intolerance for agricultural foods that was fairly medically obvious around the age of 20 and that's probably because my ancestors are from the extreme northwest of Eurasia which is Ireland and Scotland and some English those are among the last people of Eurasian ancestry to adopt agricultural diets well I have all kinds of inadequately adapted features in my genome people from places like Iran Iraq are phenomenally well adapted to wheat based diets dairy based diets so I started to have these health problems in my 20s that were you know pretty obvious and I would solve those problems by eliminating a components of my diet that caused me grief and the first thing to go was milk and then later on the next thing to go was wheat and I basically went through a slow stepwise transition from my 20s to my 50s where I stripped out the agricultural foods but that was not on the basis of the evolutionary theory that was just me talking to doctors talking to people who dealt with food allergies and stomach problems and all kinds of ugly medicine and one day this was in 2009 a friend of mine had just died of esophageal cancer and like on the Friday and I was seeing my gastroenterologist on the Monday and my symptoms had actually been worse than his symptoms my specifically esophageal symptoms and was terrified that I had a selfish you'll cancer and the gastroenterologist looked over all the records and all the times I had an endoscopy you know the camera going down your mouth under sedation and they look around and they found all this weird tissue which if a physician is listening listening I would call metaplastic not neoplastic which mean cancer but weird looking stuff that interfere with my ability of my esophagus to work and he said okay this is the medicine now tell me what you have done if anything to improve your symptoms and I explained that I had eliminated more and more foods and he said go farther it's either that or I put you on corticosteroids and I said no thank you I've seen what corticosteroids do to people and that there are some ugly medications especially if taken indefinitely which is what he was suggesting but the problem with his advice to go farther is I didn't know what he meant because I'd already eliminated all the foods that gave me immediate distress my distress I mean like emergency room distress and so I was thinking about this and I went to a seminar given by some plant molecular geneticists which was comparing the genomes of wheat rice and corn and I had already eliminated wheat from my diet but I not eliminated rice and corn so I said to them you know not being a botanist I said well this interesting comparisons but aren't wheat rice and corn very different from each other which ones their evolution genetics they said no not really they're all grass species and they're actually closely related by evolutionary standards so think like mammals different species of mammals in animal terms I said wow I did not realize that and a light bulb went off in my head and I said oh so they're like really alleviate my symptoms even though rice and corn don't put me in an ER let me try eliminating those and see if if my health improves more well I did eliminate rice and corn and I found my health was much better in terms of getting a good bang for your buck I would assumed that conference was a good one and that you learned that wheat corn and rice are closely related at least genome wise to each other and you were able to eliminate all three did you have any other discoveries and then another symptom I had was five ISM which was intolerance to fava beans like literally eating fava beans would immediately make me like really sick like I'd have to lie down and so I thought well fava beans or legumes what if I eliminate all the games from my diet ooh so I eliminated all grass species all like 'i'm species and i already eliminated everything derived from milk so i go through the next nine months and all through 2009 and slowly all of my esophageal symptoms disappear and i go fantastic the gastroenterologist was right but then what got really weird was that about seven or eight months into this continuing through yet another year every other aspect of my health and function started to improve as well everything stamina mental focus emotion just yeah less sarcopenia i lost weight i didn't do any of this to lose weight everything got better of the typical middle-aged chronic back pain that most everybody over 50 has i've disappeared fascinating so I'm going to myself in lady 2009 early 2010 I'm going to myself what the hell is going on how is this happening to me and then the light bulb turns on and I think about all the foods that I eliminated every single food that I eliminated was agricultural and every food that I had absolutely no problem with was a paleo or ancestral dietary component like fruit nuts honey eggs anything from an animal carcass like you know of course me but fat organs all that stuff worked just fine and I went ah huh it's only agricultural foods and then I thought wow Hamilton's math can explain this and then we did some math and the math starting from Hamilton's forces of natural selection worked and that was done with Larry Muller mue ller same as Robert a smaller but different first name and it worked the math worked beautifully it showed the loss of adaptation to the new environment over many generations like in the model it basically says you've got to go thousands and thousands of generations before you adapt to a new environment at later ages at early ages you can adapt to a new environment quite fast but no later ages so I went oh my god and I did of three things the first one was I persuaded Grant Rutledge and others grided students to do some experiments on this to check the math the second thing I did was I talked to my closest aging buddies both literally and figuratively that is to say also in their 50s and 60s but also interested in the science of Aging so they were aging themselves and they were just the science of aging and I said here's my latest idea what do you think and every one of my friends over 40 but I convinced of the science they changed their diets and they went through exactly the same improvement in their general health that I had gone through it just worked over and over and over again and the third thing I did was I created the 55 theses at the instigation of one of my friends who was aging and interested in aging Rob Patterson and so he built this website for me which you can find at numerals 5 5 th ee SES org and he makes a little bit of money from ads there I don't make anything from the website and there I wrote 55 sentences that outline my understanding of aging theory including the diet stuff I then wrote about 60 pages of material that's also on the website so it can be read and we did about 60 podcasts like this one where Rob Patterson took me through step by step my reasoning that led me to my final conclusion about diet aging and lifestyle what's interesting to me that as a mathematician I would have expected you to use the math to arrive to the conclusion but you kind of fell into it by accident and then used the math to prove its efficacy thank you for sharing a link to the 55 theses website on the show notes for this episode now going back to the experiment that grant did that you can miss him to do in the fruit flies and if we mimicked the diets so if after let's say after a certain age you go back to the old diet which would be the Paleolithic diet or the Paleo diet how much improvement in either a life span or health span do these flies achieve so you don't get any major health benefit as a human ongoing Paleo under the age of 30 so far as I can tell that's what the math suggests that's what our experiments basically suggest it's only once you get to later ages and in fact in humans it's really like typical you hit about 40 and in people from Middle East that might be 45 or 50 in people from Scotland it might be 30 or 35 but it's it's the same zone middle-aged and then you start to get loss of muscle mass midriff bulge mental fog less stamina you you know you can't stay up till 3:00 in the morning and then wake up at 6:00 in the morning go to work the way of 23 year old can all those things disappear okay but not if you switch to a paleo diet if you switch to a paleo diet in your 40s the midriff bulge will go away you'll return to younger stamina and you won't get any mental now if you wait until your 50s especially in my case I was in my mid-50s the health impact is far greater so the transition which I underwent from being about 53 until about 56 was really obvious within about nine months my friends were saying what did you do why do you look different you know so my my waist shrink and my you know pectoral muscles expanded a little bit I'm no athlete don't it's not that exciting to look at me on this diet and my my ability to concentrate mentally cognitively was enormous ly improved and you know as an academic you know we live off of our brains right so that's something that's probably the number one thing I appreciated you know my wife probably appreciated different things about the transition sure now interestingly other friends and colleagues of mine in their 50s have gone from like really bad health just like in some cases appalling health to quite good health and a characteristic reaction of my you know very mostly these people are professors but not only is wow this is so amazing I can't give it up it's like if they give me six months to a year and they're over 50 my colleagues basically go this is the most incredible thing that's ever happened to me fascinating so you talk about different populations having a different age at which dishes switch over to the diet there's obviously obviously genetic variations even within the populations is there a way for folks to know that even though I might be Middle Eastern or Indian or Western European I am pretty disposed because of my genetics to get or I should get on the Paleo diet sooner then generally speaking the population as a whole should okay that's a fantastic question I have spent years thinking about that question unfortunately the thing about human populations is that we're very genetically variable we have lots of genetic variation that this is one of the most important discoveries of genomics in the last over the last 20 years we've been looking at human genomes people had thought our genomes would be very simple and easy to understand they aren't and that's because there's so much variation from genome to genome not at one or two sites a lot of dozens of sites not a hundreds of sites but thousands to tens of thousands of site and a lot of that variation is medically important so each human being who's not a twin or a triplet identical twin clinical triplet is like a different Rembrandt painting okay you know if you're European you're all Rembrandt's but you're all different paintings you're all unique so right now no one can tell you a high red your genome and you have to make the dietary transition at 38 or 51 and roughly speaking you can go around the confidence of the world and on a continental scale you can use crude rules of thumb so the indigenous populations of the Americas from what is now the United States south a lot of those populations have had corn based agriculture for a few thousand years an order of magnitude less than Eurasian populations so they're well adapted to those diets you know into their 20s but probably by the time they hit 30 they've got to stop even the corn based diet they're pretty well adapted to when they're 15 so they have an earlier transition likewise in Africa there are some African agricultural population so for example the area that now corresponds to Nigerian the surrounding countries and I believe it was millet based agriculture but not of as long-standing as Eurasia so again they're probably looking at around a 30-ish age of transition the the most long-standing agricultural adaptations are characteristic of the populations of Asia from the Middle East and northeastern Asia so in other words Elysion countries versus northern China and the primary crops are our grains things like wheat barley rye interestingly in Southeast Asia the primary crop was rice and those people often show loss of adaptation to grain-based foods like we also of course East Asians are not adapted to dairy products and that there's a little actually a lot of good research on that so in fact the history of adaptation to grass species versus milk is not the same so of course the people are best adapted to dairy products are the populations of South Asia the Middle East in Europe and other than that massive band of humanity you know no that's only order of two billion people the rest of the world's population is not particularly adapted to milk derived foods after the age of five or six now I want to ask you it this is a question I ask every guest what are your top three anti-aging hacks or tips and I think one of them would be switch to the Paleo diet at 30 40 45 based on your where you're from what would the other two be Michael number two I would say is activity patterns I don't think you need to be a marathon runner in fact the data are that literally hunter-gatherers who live and feed their families by web not they kill a giraffe on a given week they are actually on average no more active than we are in our relatively sedentary existence I think there are two good reasons for this one of which which is not generally appreciated by National Geographic filmmakers is after going on a long and grueling hunt for a day they'll then take it one two or three days off and lie around and do almost nothing it's their body can recover okay the second point is the number one most metabolically expensive structure in your body is your brain even though only related like between 3 & 4 pounds it can consume anywhere from 20 to 50% of all the calories in your metabolic activity our brain is hugely metabolically expensive to build in to maintain and to use all right and it sucks up vast amounts of calories so keeping your brain active literally is keeping your metabolism active nonetheless we are nonetheless adapted to when we're young agricultural levels of activity which means no cars right you walk everywhere you had worse go there on horseback or pre-agricultural levels of activity which means not even any horses you walk everywhere you go or you walk run walk run walk run rest walk run um so I walk to work and I actually this has been a lifelong pattern with me I I've avoided cars you know from the age of 16 but I went on how FAR's your work from home uh about a month so but this is a lifelong pattern I have lived anywhere from half a mile to three miles away from my place of work and I've always commuted on foot and the third thing which I think is the least important but still nice is you know you have to realize we are a semi tribal animal we're not liable as baboons but we're still moderately tribal and people like having groups of at least moderately friendly allies whom they see in real life on daily basis so the 21st century schizoid man lifestyle and that's a prog illusion I'm not broken first King Crimson um for some where you spend most of your time in your basement communicating only through computer screens or cell phones via social media podcasting with remote access that is an emotionally aberrant lifestyle which makes people lonely I agree which is why I'm gonna come to coffee or to lunch with you shortly that would be great okay Michael thank you so much this has been a really fascinating talk I've learned so much personally where can our listeners find you online so I have the 55 pcs which is in a sense inert in that I don't repeatedly post it on it in addition you can find me on LinkedIn you can find me on Facebook on LinkedIn I'd say the majority of my posts are relevant to health and aging so I'll include some of those links in the show notes to this episode so people can can follow your work and get a hold of you should they oh you can also find me at the University of California I have a faculty profile page at the University of California Irvine which has my email information my office phone number all that good stuff I'm easy to find I did Michael Rose Aging and that found you pretty quickly because I was stumbling through Google for a while as well yeah Michael Rose Aging is another good way to do it Michael thank you for being on the show and I hope to talk to you very soon you can find all the information we discussed in this episode and links to studies of the show notes at anti aging hacks dotnet to make sure you get notified of new episodes please subscribe to the podcast you can also follow us on instagram at anti aging hacks and on facebook at facebook.com forward slash anti aging hacks and now for the disclaimers this podcast is for general information purposes only and does not constitute medical advice opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests please seek the advice of your health professional for any health or medical condition you .
Video Description:
In this episode of Anti-Aging Hacks, I talk to a top Evolutionary Biologist and a prominent researcher on Aging:
1. When does the agricultural diet serve us well?
2. If Paleo may be the best diet for us starting in Middle-Age?
3. What is evolutionary biology and an evolutionary biologist's view of a healthier and longer life
=====================================================================
►Connect with us:
- Download our latest book to slow down your aging FREE: https://antiaginghacks.net/fasteraging
- Website: https://antiaginghacks.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antiaginghacks
- If you are suffering from hair loss, go here to find the most effective techniques to stop hair loss: https://www.livlumen.com
======================================================================
My guest today is Michael Rose, Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the university of Irvine. He has a fascinating way of approaching aging and we get to discuss some of his experiments. I am glad to have him on the show today.
1997: Awarded the Busse Research Prize by the World Congress of Gerontology.
2004: Published summary of his work on the postponement of aging, Methuselah Flies,
2005: Wrote a popular book called the The Long Tomorrow.
2011: Wrote a popular book called Does Aging Stop?
He has more than 300 publications, and has given hundreds of scientific talks around the world. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine.
Michael's information:
https://55theses.org/
UC Irvine Faculty page: https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5261
Linkedin Page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-rose-0241305/
