Feb 27, 2017 11:00 AM EST By Chris Brandt, UniversityHerald Reporter

A recent Harvard study said that eating 'old' food causes molecular damage that shortens the life span. As the body age, the damage accumulates more than the body can handle.

Vadim Gladyshev, a professor of medicine at Harvard, and his team performed a series of experiments that bolstered the evidence for the theory that molecular damage sustained by cells over time is what causes aging.

The experiment involved feeding lab rats, flies, and yeast with 'old' and 'young' organisms to test their effects on the subjects. For example, they created one cell-cultured medium extracted from young and old yeast cells. Then, they placed new yeast cells on each medium and observe which of the two groups will live longer. The medium extracted from 'old' yeast has a shorter life span than the ones extracted from the young yeast cells.

The scientists also created the same procedure to mice and flies. They collected 5,000 fresh dead flies which have lived for 45 days and another 5,000 that were between three and five days old. They fed these two types of diets to two groups of young flies and achieved the same result - those fed with old flies had shorter life span. The same happened to mic - their life span decreased by 10 percent.

Gladyshev said that although the results regarding the effect of diet to aging is consistent, it was not huge. He said the results can be interpreted that these minor yet accumulated factors can have an effect in the aging process. He added that the molecular damage inside the body have a stronger effect than the one introduced through the diet.

Therefore, the question remains how to slow down this molecular damage or how to restructure cellular structure that will reverse or slow down the process? This is still the question that needs to be addressed and can be discovered through further research.

The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

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