Eating Less Meat Relation To Aging

(José Ignacio Pompé/Unsplash)
HEALTH
There's a Surprising, Smelly Reason Why Eating Less Meat

Is Linked to Healthy Aging
RUI WANG, THE CONVERSATION
22 JANUARY 2021
High-protein diets are having a moment. In any grocery store you can now buy a protein
bowl, pick up a protein box of eggs and nuts for lunch, or snack on a protein bar.
But there's evidence that restricting which proteins you eat - particularly cutting back on
meat - could be important for healthy aging. The surprising reason: it forces the tissues to
make hydrogen sulphide (H2S), a gas that's poisonous if inhaled and smells like rotten
eggs, but promotes health inside the body.
As a physiology researcher, I have long been interested in the strange role of H2S in the
body. This is not a gas anyone wants around. It stinks, is a component of atulence, and its
toxicity has been linked to at least one mass extinction.
And yet, the body naturally produces small amounts of it as a signalling molecule to act as
a chemical messenger. Now, we are starting to understand the link between diet and H2S
production.
Diet restrictions that increase longevity
Less can be more when it comes to food. When scientists have put organisms on carefully
balanced but restricted diets, these organisms have substantially increased healthy
lifespans.
This holds true for yeasts, fruit ies, worms and monkeys. In mice, such diets reduce
cancer risk, strengthen the immune system and improve cognitive function.
But because aging and longevity are complex processes, it has been di cult for
researchers to pin down the mechanisms at work. Recent studies have shed new light, and
it is apparent that H2S plays a crucial role.
Studies since the 1990s have shown that reducing intake of certain sulphur-containing
amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can increase longevity in rats by around 30
per cent. More recently, a collaborative team involving me and led by scientists at Harvard,
performed a series of animal studies in which we restricted the intake of two sulphur
amino acids - cysteine and methionine - to study what e ects this had.
It caused the animals to ramp up production of H2S in their tissues, which triggered a
cascade of bene cial e ects. These included increased new blood vessel generation,
which promotes cardiovascular health, and better resistance to oxidative stress in the liver,
which is linked to liver disease.
But it remained to be seen whether similar e ects would occur in humans. Earlier this
year, a study using data from the 11,576 adults in NHANES III, the US national nutrition
survey, delivered evidence that they do. It found that reduced dietary intake of these
sulphur amino acids is linked to lower cardiometabolic risk factors, including lower levels
of cholesterol and glucose in the blood. Cardiometabolic risk factors are those linked to
heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Eat less meat, live longer?
The upshot of this research is that there's good evidence that limiting intake of foods
containing high levels of sulphur amino acids can reduce the risk of chronic diseases like
diabetes and heart disease, and promote healthy aging.
In North America, most of us are a long way from achieving this. Because these sulphur
amino acids are abundant in meat, dairy and eggs, which feature prominently in our
shopping carts, we eat on average 2.5 times our daily requirement of them.
Red meat is particularly high in sulphur amino acids, but sh and poultry white meat also
contain a lot (the dark meat has less). Switching to plant-based proteins would help reduce
this intake.
Beans, lentils and legumes are good sources of protein that are also low in sulphur amino
acids. But beware: soy protein, which is the basis of foods like tofu, is surprisingly high in
sulphur amino acids. Meanwhile, vegetables like broccoli contain lots of sulphur but not in
amino acid form.
One important caveat is that sulphur amino acids play vital roles in growth, so children
should not adopt diets that are low in them.
Other roles for H2S
It might seem odd that a toxic gas can help maintain health, but it may re ect the origins
of life on early Earth when the atmosphere was much richer in sulphur gas than it is today.
Indeed, we are starting to appreciate how fundamental H2S signalling may be.
For example, it has also been shown to reduce in ammation, opening the door to potential
new treatments for arthritis or potential use as a painkiller.
The trick is delivering H2S where it's needed - safely. Several pharmaceutical companies
are working on compounds that bind it while in transit through the body, and release it in
tiny doses in the tissues. In time, these could be used as preventive measures to support
healthy aging. This would be useful because the drawback of a low-sulphur amino acid
diet is that humans are notoriously bad at sticking to such plans long-term.
In the lab, we can control experimental diets. In the real world, people snack or grab a
burger when they don't want to cook. If delivery mechanisms can be made reliably and
cheaply enough, it could be possible to gain the health e ects of increased tissue H2S
without dictating what people eat.
Rui Wang, Dean, Faculty of Science, York University, Canada.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article.

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(José Ignacio Pompé/Unsplash)

There's a Surprising, Smelly Reason Why Eating Less Meat

Diet restrictions that increase longevity

Eat less meat, live longer?

Other roles for H2S

Rui Wang, Dean, Faculty of Science, York University, Canada.

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