The idea of a pill that could slow aging, reduce the risk of disease, help with weight loss and have few side effects would be attractive to most people.
While the lifestyle habits of not smoking, practicing regular exercise, weight management, adequate sleep, optimal blood pressure and laboratory studies, and a whole-food diet rich in brightly colored fruits and vegetables are uniformly recognized to favor health over disease, the new medicine of longevity is researching the promise of even more strategies of health extension. In animal models, restricting calorie intake and various fasting protocols often leads to enhanced health outcomes and a prolongation of lifespan. While fasting can be incorporated into daily habits with relative ease using 12–14 hours of avoidance of meals (time restricted eating), along with the 5 day fasting mimicking diet (FMD), there is evidence that there may be medications that parallel the benefits of fasting and may even replace it without the challenge of eating less. One of the medications that has captured interest as a potential candidate for this role is called rapamycin. What is rapamycin?
Rapamycin was identified in the 1960’s from soil samples from Easter Island. The compound proved to have an impact on immune function and was approved in 1999 as Rapimmune for the prevention of rejection of organ transplants like a kidney transplant. A researcher at MIT in the 1990’s, David Sabatini, MD, identified a protein called mTOR that has a major role in cell…
