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Ageing

Diet and longevity in the balance

Nature volume 462, pages 989–990 (2009)Cite this article

Dietary restriction promotes longevity but impairs fecundity in many organisms. When the amino acids in a diet are fine-tuned, however, lifespan can be increased without loss of fecundity — at least in fruitflies.

It's common wisdom that eating the right food, and not too much of it, is good for you. Dietary restriction — reduced food intake without malnutrition — indeed prolongs lifespan in organisms ranging from yeast, worms and flies to rodents, monkeys and possibly humans. But dietary restriction also has its costs: it often impairs fecundity, possibly because maintenance of the soma (the non-germline parts of an organism), and thus long life, are incompatible with the metabolic demands of reproduction in such circumstances. Biologists have long thought that an organism's response to food shortage is an evolutionary device that allows individuals to survive a famine by diverting resources away from reproduction and reallocating them to essential functions for survival1,2.

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Figure 1: Signalling pathways possibly influenced by dietary amino acids in Drosophila.

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  1. Thomas Flatt is in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, Institute of Population Genetics, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Veterinärplatz 1, A-1210 Vienna, Austria. thomas.flatt@vetmeduni.ac.at,

    Thomas Flatt

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Flatt, T. Diet and longevity in the balance. Nature 462, 989–990 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462989a

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