Study links high sugar diet to shorter lifespan

MOSCOW (PNA/Sputnik) — Eating a high sugar diet shortens your life, even long after you improve what you eat, because during the time you spent eating badly, your genes have been reprogrammed for the long-term, according to scientists, and there’s no cheating – low calorie sweeteners aren’t any better for you!

A team of researchers from University College London (UCL) and Monash University (Australia), in an experiment on Drosophila flies, discovered that flies fed a high sugar diet in early life died sooner even if their diet was improved later on.

The reason is that the unhealthy diet inhibits the action of a gene called FOXO which causes long-term effects, according to a study published on Wednesday in Cell Reports on Jan. 10.

“Dietary history has a long lasting effect on health, and now we know a mechanism behind this. We think the reprogramming of the flies’ genes caused by the high sugar diet might occur in other animals. We don’t know that it happens in humans, but the signs suggest that it could,” said the report’s first author, Dr. Adam Dobson from UCL Institute of Healthy Ageing.

The research team compared the lifespans of female flies fed a healthy diet containing 5% sugar with that of other flies given 40% sugar diet.

All were given a healthy diet after three weeks, but the flies that had previously eaten a high-sugar diet died 7% earlier on average. Usually the flies of that species live to about 90 days.

To understand how the high sugar diet affected longevity, the scientists analyzed the flies at a molecular level. They found out that the unhealthy diet promoted molecular changes reducing the FOXO gene. FOXO is important for longevity in a wide variety of species, including humans, so the findings may have broad implications.