Aging is the inevitable destiny of all living things and the dream of phoenix like quasi deaths that result in complete regeneration and renewal are just that… dreams. The final swan song of each one of us, if you take the odd premature termination of life, will be the same. Cells and organs will age, deteriorate and error accumulations in the genome and epigenome will result in a final failure or disease that will take us out. The search for the holy grail and the spring of eternal youth has fuelled exploration since it seems like a cruel joke to give sentience to a being that is mortal yet on the other hand, if the end point is imminent, it serves as a motivator to move and make this round here count, to leave a legacy, while alchemy had been substituted by science and the search continues.

The disposable soma theory, which British Biologist Thomas Kirkwood postulated in 1977, is built on the fundaments of a previous theory by Leslie Orgel – The error catastrophe theory of aging – postulates in 1963. The disposable soma theory says that there is an evolutionary trade-off going on with limited resources within the body which is trying to make the best of what it has to work with. On the one side of the scale stand growth and reproduction and on the other DNA repair and maintenance, meaning that when our body is mostly concerned with growing it pays less attention to maintenance of the already existing tissues. It’s a sacrifice and a triage – since growing is energetically very expensive and there is just not enough resources to go around. If you’re building a temporary body that is fit for reproduction, muscular, able to take on severe stressors, run longer, which is very fertile you take a toll on the long term plan which is far more concerned with combating cellular damage, shortening of telomeres (the caps on the tips of chromosomes which keep the genetic material from unravelling like a shoestring without the protector at the end) accumulation of mutations, compromised stem cells and senescence aka old cells that have gotten “confused” regarding their function.

This mechanism of trade-off underpins the debate around eating meat, red meat in particular. Why? Well we’re glad you asked. Because there is something called mTOR which basically detects the amounts of amino acids we’re ingesting and tells the body’s cells to grow grow grow when we’re flooded with animal protein, as we mostly are in our Western diets. Growth for only growths sake is the logic of a tumour. You’ll get a short term benefit – for example enhanced performance and more muscle mass if you’re an athlete, but in the long term it is unsustainable and depletes the body that is investing only in growth and ignoring the repair side of the coin, effectively aging your tissues. Eating a lot of meat and meat products will literally visibly age you by overloading the mTOR pathways with the command to just grow. There is a huge correlation with the extended life span of people living in what is called the Blue Zones where centennials are far more common and the general population lives longer and into a healthier old age. In the Blue Zones the food is mostly plant based and animal protein is largely derived from occasional consumption of fish and other sea foods. There is also a cultural custom of eating smaller and lighter meals and rarely getting to the point where you’re completely full, stopping when you’re about 80% full.

Most of us don’t need the amount of calories we’re ingesting because it switches us into carb burners rather than fat burners we were designed to be by evolution. There is nothing fancy you need to do to feel and biologically be younger. Just eat less meat and skip a meal here and there to get into ketosis and start clearing the junk accumulated in the cell and intracellular areas. You’d be surprised how good the body is designed to fell if you’re not constantly burdening it with the things it doesn’t need. Choose more vegan or vegetarian options, push vegetables, especially those with deep colours, onto your plate whenever you can, skip a meal (or few) once a week to redirect the energy that would have gone into digesting into a self-cleaning process. So if you’ve stressed the body to grow, give it time to recuperate, if you’ve had a period of over eating do a cleanse. When it seems like nothing is growing there is vital maintenance happening.