There may be a detox that offers real promise

For years, fad diet fans have embraced detox as a way to cleanse the body and lose weight. The National Institutes of Health have concluded there isn’t much evidence to support the effectiveness of detox.

But University of Virginia scientists have found a promising way to delay aging by detoxifying the body of glycerol and glyceraldehyde, harmful by-products of fat that naturally accumulate over time.

The scientists studied microscopic worms called C. elegans, which share more than 70% of genes with humans. Researchers found they could prompt an anti-aging response by pausing a particular gene, called adh-1, resulting in the production of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase that prevents the toxicity caused by glycerol and, indirectly, glyceraldehyde.

The enzyme is well studied because it detoxifies the body of ethanol, the alcohol commonly found in beer and bourbon.

As a result of the detoxification, the worms’ health and lifespan was improved by 50%. 

To test whether the approach could potentially work with humans, researchers confirmed that the enzyme had similar beneficial effects on lifespan in another lab model, yeast. Then they pored through other research and found levels of the anti-aging enzyme increased in all the mammals tested, including humans.

“The discovery was unexpected. We went after a very well-supported hypothesis that the secret to longevity was the activation of a cell-rejuvenating process named autophagy and ended up finding an unrecognized mechanism of health and lifespan extension,” UVA researcher Eyleen Jorgelina O’Rourke told UVA Today.

“With age-related diseases currently being the major health burden for patients, their families, and the healthcare system, targeting the process of aging itself would be the most effective way to reduce this burden and increase the number of years of independent healthy living for all of us,” she said.

O’Rourke speculates that her research, published in the journal “Current Biology,” could potentially lead to therapies to lengthen and improve lifespans because enzymes are highly druggable, which means they can be targeted by drugs. 

“This existing knowledge greatly facilitates our search for drugs that can specifically activate this anti-aging process,” she said.