Wellness Wednesday

High Sugar Diets Lead to Low Lifespan

Unhealthy dieting leads to the reprogramming of gene expression, leading to shorter lives.

Here's something to keep in mind for those dieting or trying to keep to their New Year's resolutions; a study conducted by UCL researchers found that flies fed high sugar diets died sooner, even if their diets improved later. The study was published in Cell Reports and discovered that the action of a gene called FOXO is inhibited in flies who are fed a high sugar diet early in life. The severity of this finding is striking due to the importance of its role in longevity in various species genomes, including humans. 

The study compared flies whose diets consisted of 5% sugar to the other flies whose diets consisted of 8 times the amount of the previously mentioned sugar. The flies were fed the diet for three weeks (90 days is the average lifespan of a fly). The flies who ate a high sugar diet had a 7% shorter lifespan than the flies who ate a 5% sugar diet, even though they ate a healthy diet after the three week sugar binge. When the scientists took a look at the flies on a molecular level, they found that the FOXO gene had been altered which accelerated aging at an early stage. The study concluded that more research is warranted on humans to study the related effects, but stated that there should also be more emphasis on early life prevention of high sugar diets.