There is a paradox in anti-aging research that advocates for:
- Low or no animal protein
Despite glucose-lowering drugs like acarbose and canagliflozin showing impressive lifespan extension benefits in mice in the NIH’s Intervention Testing Program.
Why is it a paradox?
Because if you cut out animal products, you:
- Decrease satiety – potentially making you more vulnerable to cravings or eating bad food
- Almost inevitably increase carbohydrate and glucose consumption.
Not good!
Therefore you either need:
- An incredibly strict diet
- Calorie control/restriction
- Or to add drugs to modulate glucose
However, with animal products, you can achieve low “area under the curve” glucose levels without the use of drugs or calorie restriction.
This is because:
- Fat does not stimulate insulin secretion – and it’s easy to get healthy non-plant-based fats, such as tallow or grass-fed butter.
- Protein stimulates insulin secretion, but less so than many plant-based carbohydrates and simple sugars.
So…
This suggests we need to figure out if, in humans, the restriction of protein and/or methionine is as important as the lowering of glucose and insulin.
It’s quite possible that having low blood glucose/insulin + plenty of animal protein + fat is superior.
Sometimes there is emphasis on amino acids being regulators of mTOR. However, insulin is also a regulator of mTOR.
