Food supplements found to reverse the ageing process

Substances found in many food supplements could reverse the ageing process. A study found that the chemical additives reinvigorated old laboratory rats, which started to behave as if half their age.

Two common additives to dietary supplements gave the rats a new lease of life, improved their memory and added an energetic spark that was previously missing, said Bruce Ames, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

"With the two supplements together, these old rats got up and did the macarena. The brain looks better, they are full of energy, everything we looked at looks more like a young animal," he said.

"We did two different tests for cognitive activity in rats, and in both it made a big difference to feed them this mixture. Memory degenerates with age, and this makes them better," Professor Ames said.

The scientists found that a vital energy-producing enzyme within the cells of the body, called carnitine acetyltransferase, was less active in old rats compared with their younger counterparts. This could explain why the "powerhouses" of the cell – the mitochondria – do not work as well as they once did in older animals, including humans.

Adding the two dietary supplements, called acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid, to the rats' food restored the enzyme's activity to a level close to that found in young animals, said Tory Hagen, an assistant professor at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University, at Corvallis.

"The animals seem to have much more vigour and are much more active than animals not on this diet, signalling massive improvement to these animals' health and well-being, and we also see a reversal in loss of memory.

"That is a dual-track improvement that is significant and unique," Professor Hagen said.

The study, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and discussed at the American Association for the Advancement of Science at its annual meeting in Boston, could mean that the same supplements might perform a similar role in humans.

Professor Hagen said: "We significantly reversed the decline in overall activity typical of aged rats to what you see in a middle-aged to young adult rat seven to 10 months of age. This is equivalent to making a 75 to 80-year-old person act middle-aged. We've only shown short-term effects, but the results give us the rationale for looking at these things long term.

"With ageing, we see so many different things that are occurring to mitochondria that then lead to consequences in the cell. If you tune up mitochondria you may have a means of at least delaying the onset of a number of age- related problems that we encounter, or we can in some ways, hopefully, reverse what has already taken place," Professor Hagen said.