Adding ages: The fight to cheat death is hotting up

The Economist
Originally published August 13, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Scientists at the Institute for Ageing Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, want to mount a trial of metformin in elderly subjects to see whether it delays various maladies (and also death). If that turns out to be the case, it will go a long way to showing that there is a generalised ageing process that can be modulated with drugs. Nir Barzilai, one of the researchers involved, says an important reason to do the trial is to have an indication against which next-generation ageing drugs can be assessed by regulators.

This sort of interest seems to be triggering a change of tone at America’s Food and Drug Administration over whether it might approve an anti-ageing drug. The regulator is thinking about when a broad, and so far unprecedented, claim of anti-ageing might be considered to be supported by the evidence; it is “looking forward to seeing this area of science evolve”. In the dry language of a government agency these are encouraging words.

If an unregulated diet can do the trick, why does the world need drugs? Three reasons. One is that taking a few pills a day will be easier for most than subsisting on low-calorie muffins and salad. A second is that companies can make money making pills and will compete to create them. A third is that pills may work better than diets. Dr Barzilai, who is in the pill camp, points out that CR works less well in primates than other mammals, and that people with low body-mass indices, a natural condition for those restricting their calories, are in general more likely to die. Those who do well on CR, he says, are likely to be a subset benefiting from the right genetic make-up. His hope is that a range of targeted therapies might allow everyone to get the benefits.

The article is here.

Senators Scold Mehmet Oz For Diet Scams

By Maggie Fox
NBC News
Originally posted June 18, 2014

Dr. Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor who frequently extols weight-loss products on his syndicated television show, got a harsh scolding from several senators on Tuesday at a hearing about bogus diet product ads.

Oz was held up as the power driving many of the fraudulent ads, even as he argued he was himself the victim of the scammers. The hearing is a follow-up to the Federal Trade Commission’s crackdown last January against fake diet products.

“I don’t get why you need to say this stuff because you know it’s not true,” Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat who chairs a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, said at the hearing. “So why, when you have this amazing megaphone…why would you cheapen your show by saying things like that?”

The entire article is here.

Getting Fat and Fatter

By Kim McPherson
The Lancet
doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60966-0

Book Review
Fat Fate and Disease: Why Exercise and Diet Are Not Enough
By Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson
Oxford University Press

"We need a public debate about what it means to keep markets in their place. And to have this debate, we have to think through the moral limits of markets. We need to recognise that there are some things that money can't buy and other things that money can buy but shouldn't."

Michael Sandel, “Market and Morals”

We live in a world where it is increasingly apparent that markets have all sorts of unwanted consequences, but they remain the bedrock of our civilisation. That we should relentlessly pursue economic growth is unquestioned, while the planet is drying up and we are becoming increasingly obese. And by a dominant political account the way to grow is to liberate the markets wherever we can. Thus the planet nears extinction more quickly and the prevalence of type 2 diabetes increases alarmingly across the globe. So is some kind of consensual good will required, as Michael Sandel suggested in his 2009 Reith Lecture?

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We have yet to discover an acceptable way to make markets properly balance all the pay-offs caused by unhealthy production, one of which is to suffer loss at the point of production commensurate with the harm of causing bad health in the longer term. We are not even close. Good will and responsible citizenship are not, I suspect, going to solve this problem simply because profit and growth trump everything.

The entire review and commentary are here.