Spring Chicken Page 20
They had no idea how this happened, but it was enough to convince Walford to get serious about his own diet: He cut down to a protein shake for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and a baked sweet potato and perhaps a bit of fish for dinner. He stuck to this menu, which Cornaro would have considered gluttonous, pretty much for the rest of his life. And he began preaching the wonders of caloric restriction to anyone who would listen. In health-conscious California, he found a receptive audience. He published a series of popular books, beginning with The 120 Year Diet, which sold well despite its title. “Who wants to be on a diet for 120 years?” Weindruch asks.
But he hardly denied himself. “Roy was very different from most other caloric-restriction practitioners who I’ve met,” says Weindruch. He kept himself rigorously fit by lifting weights at the original Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach. At dinner parties, he would conspicuously abstain from eating while everyone else pigged out; he joked to a friend that this made him feel “naughty.” Supposedly, he only starved himself every other day; on alternate days, he was known to inhale stunning quantities of food. His friend Tuck Finch noted that their raucous, boozy dinners together always seemed to fall on Walford’s “on” days, which still strikes Finch as “statistically unlikely.”
Thanks to Walford, and McCay before him, “controlled starvation for the sake of health” had attracted a small but committed group of followers, including Don Dowden. Scientifically speaking, though, the jury was still out on the question of whether or not caloric restriction was actually good for people. For obvious reasons—mainly because the study would take decades—there was no good data on human subjects.
But then, in the early 1990s, Walford got the chance to be part of something that would radically change his career, and his life. In one of his periodic restless phases, he signed on as chief medical officer for Biosphere 2, the famous (or infamous) earthbound “space station” that was being built in the desert north of Tucson. “I find it useful to punctuate time with dangerous and eccentric activities,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times.
Funded by the venturesome oil heir Ed Bass, who considered himself an environmentalist, Biosphere 2 was a glass-enclosed, 3.15-acre terrarium that was designed to replicate the major ecosystems of earth (Biosphere 1). Walford and seven other “Terranauts” would spend two years inside the hermetically sealed chamber, living off the food they produced in their extensive organic gardens and indoor fish farm. They would receive nothing from outside, not even air or water, which would be recycled by the indoor ecosystem.
When the crew entered the Biosphere on September 26, 1991, Walford cut a striking figure in his Star Trek–style uniform, which perfectly matched his Spock-like ears and shiny dome. Things soon took an unexpected turn, however, when the explorers discovered that they could not produce enough food to feed themselves. Spotting an opportunity to turn lemons into diet lemonade, Walford decided that this was the perfect chance to study caloric restriction in people: Henceforth, the eight crew members would be placed on a sharply reduced ration of less than eighteen hundred calories per person per day, at first. As team physician, Walford would monitor its effects on them.
Normally, humans are hardwired to cheat on any kind of diet, which is another reason it is so difficult to study caloric restriction. But now the Biosphere had presented Walford with eight captive lab rats, for two years. Their so-called healthy starvation diet was heavy on fruits (they grew bananas, papayas, and kumquats), and a long list of vegetables, nuts, and legumes, plus a handful of eggs, dairy from their goats, and a very small amount of tilapia and chicken. Only 10 percent of their calories came from fat, and they ate meat only on Sundays. All this was supposed to fuel them through eighty-hour weeks of serious manual labor, including tending the crops, maintaining heavy equipment, pruning back vines that climbed the glass-steel walls, and even donning scuba gear to clean the fish tanks.
Not surprisingly, the Terranauts lost weight like sumo wrestlers in a steam room, shedding pounds until their average BMI dropped below twenty for men and women alike (or in scientific terms, “really skinny”). One man lost 58 pounds, going from a portly 208 to a sleek 150. They lost weight so fast that Walford grew concerned that their fat cells were releasing toxins, like pesticides and pollutants, back into their bodies. They were indeed, he found, but the strict diet and heavy physical workload also caused more immediate problems, like that they were starving. According to crew member Jane Poynter, who wrote a memoir revealingly titled The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, it became accepted practice to lick one’s plate clean after every meal, so as not to miss a single precious calorie. The supply of bananas, the tastiest item on the menu, had to be kept under lock and key. Saddest of all, the Terranauts would occasionally peer through binoculars at tourists eating at the on-site hot-dog stand, like monks watching porn. “Roy was having a whale of a time, however,” Poynter deadpanned, “because this was his life’s work.”
This was true. Walford had only ever been able to observe CR’s effects on laboratory mice (also rats, fish, and monkeys). Now he was able to measure its effects on humans, including himself. He sampled the crew members’ blood every eight weeks, and found that they had the best blood he had ever seen. Their cholesterol levels had dropped drastically, from an average of more than 200 down to well below 140. Their insulin and blood glucose levels also plummeted, as did their blood pressure, according to a paper Walford published while still “inside.” Metabolically and cardiovascularly speaking, these were some of the healthiest people on the planet. Or so they seemed.
When the eight Terranauts emerged from the Biosphere, in September 1993, pomp and ceremony competed with sheer relief that the long, intensely scrutinized project was finally over. Though it had begun in an atmosphere of gee-whiz optimism—this is how we’ll live on Mars!—the project had endured withering skepticism and a spate of negative press, including a Village Voice takedown that explored the project’s roots in a strange organization called Synergia, which the paper characterized as a cult. Two years of confinement had divided the crew into bitter, warring factions; the tension and drama inside the Bubble actually helped inspire the reality TV series Big Brother. The meager diet had not helped morale, either. Opening the “seal” was meant to be a joyful day for all concerned. At least now they’d be able to visit the hot-dog stand.
For Walford, though, the end of the Biosphere marked the beginning of a dark new chapter of his life. He had been fit and vibrant when he entered the capsule, looking far younger than his sixty-seven years. Two years inside had ravaged his body. Perhaps it was the lack of food, perhaps something else, but in photos taken in the Biosphere, Walford is thin to the point of emaciation, his eyes haggard and sunken. He’d lost 25 pounds from an already-lean 145, and he looks much older than the post-Biosphere version of himself, on the right.
Roy Walford during (L) and after (R) the Biosphere.
Credit: Journal of Gerontology
But the real damage was invisible. In the six months after leaving the Biosphere, Walford fell into a deep depression, drinking his way through a bottle of vodka every four days. He had injured his back while working in the compound, and he could barely walk, at first. Something seemed to have changed in his brain, as well: Just three years after leaving the Biosphere, he began experiencing episodes of “freezing,” where he would simply stop walking, and fall down. Soon he required a walker.
Those close to him suspected that he had acquired some form of Parkinson’s, and that it may have been caused not by caloric restriction, but by oxygen restriction. The Biosphere’s designers had not foreseen that the vast concrete surfaces in the complex would absorb literally tons of precious oxygen, in effect asphyxiating the crew. Walford himself grew alarmed, about six months in, when he found he could no longer perform simple calculations.
Even after the atmosphere was “rebalanced,” by injecting oxygen and installing more CO2 scrubbers (which journalists later gleefull
y discovered), oxygen levels remained low. The Biospherians were living at the atmospheric equivalent of seven thousand feet above sea level, which can be taxing. Not only that, but CO2 and carbon monoxide concentrations crept dangerously high. Carbon monoxide exposure, in particular, has been linked to Parkinson’s and other neurological disorders.
Despite his illness, though, Walford’s mind remained sharp, and he stuck to his diet, insisting that it had slowed its progression, rather than hastened it. As late as 2001, he touted the benefits of caloric restriction to Alan Alda, who then hosted a TV show for Scientific American, insisting that caloric restriction would “let me live longer than I would otherwise.” He said he hoped to live to be 110 years old, just like Suzanne Somers.
But physically, he was a wreck. A video taken of Walford that same year is truly shocking: Barely a decade after entering Biosphere, as a vigorous real-life version of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, he had been reduced to a stooped, jittering old man, hunched over and barely able to walk on his own. He had already been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, from which he eventually died in 2004. Although immortality had eluded him, Walford had packed more living into his seventy-nine years on earth than most of us could fit into three lifetimes.
By the time Roy Walford died, he and other scientists had spent decades studying caloric restriction—make that centuries, if we count Luigi Cornaro—without ever understanding one important thing: how it actually worked.
The most surprising thing about caloric restriction was that it worked, period. It goes against all common sense; you’d think that starving animals would grow weak with hunger and perhaps even die. But in fact the opposite is true. Mice placed on a restricted diet become far more active, running literally miles farther, when their cages are equipped with treadmills, than their normally fed brothers and sisters, according to Rick Weindruch. It’s not only mice and rats, either; a wide range of creatures, from dogs all the way down to lowly yeast, have all been shown to fare better on restricted diets. And for the longest time, nobody had the faintest idea why.
Weindruch and Walford suspected that lack of food somehow shifted the animal—whether it be a single-celled yeast, or a mouse, or a human—into a different metabolic state that was, somehow, healthier. “It isn’t that this car is blue and this car is red,” says Rozalyn Anderson, a colleague of Weindruch’s at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s that this car has a different engine.”
In the early 1990s, an MIT scientist named Leonard Guarente discovered a specific gene in yeast that seemed to respond to lack of nutrients. The one-celled booze makers seemed to be able to sense the amount of food that was available to them, and reprogram their metabolism accordingly, in ways that helped them live longer. The actual gene itself was called SIR2, and it seemed to be responsible for optimizing cell function in response to a lack of food.
The story grew even more intriguing when SIR2-like genes were found in other organisms, from worms to fruit flies to mice to monkeys. These genes, dubbed sirtuins, appeared to be what scientists call “conserved”—that is, they had evolved in numerous different species of animals, and even in some plants. This meant they were somehow important to life itself, and it’s easy to see why: They enabled animals to survive the long periods of hunger that are part and parcel of life in the natural world. A hunter-gatherer who could endure a lean winter, growing stronger and healthier while eating less food, would enjoy an evolutionary advantage over one who required a steady diet of Big Macs. To the contrary, it’s when we’re well fed and bloated that our genes seem to want to kill us off.
The discovery of sirtuins electrified the aging field. Their existence meant that, on some level, we had longevity pathways hardwired into our cells. Then, in 2003, a student of Guarente’s named David Sinclair discovered that sirtuin genes could be activated by a compound called resveratrol—which just so happens to be found in red wine (it’s produced in the skins of grapes, where its job is to ward off fungal infections as the fruit ripens). In a study published in Nature in 2006, Sinclair and his team showed that mice on a high-fat diet lived just as long as normal mice—when they were given resveratrol. Not only that, but they were fitter, faster, and lots better-looking than their chubby colleagues.
The media went bananas over the story. It made the front page of the New York Times, and now it was Sinclair’s turn to clink glasses with Morley Safer of 60 Minutes. He dazzled Barbara Walters with his youthful good looks, and within days, it seemed, the Internet was flooded with ads for resveratrol supplements, some of which implied that Sinclair himself endorsed their products (which he did not). One of the few existing resveratrol supplements, a brand called Longevinex, saw demand soar 2,400-fold in the space of two weeks. If ever there was a drug tailor-made for overweight, fast-food-gorging Americans, resveratrol seemed to be it.
And it dovetailed nicely with the so-called French Paradox, where the French eat all sorts of fatty foods and yet do not succumb to heart disease (or obesity) at nearly the rates that Americans do. Red wine was long thought to be the reason, and lo, resveratrol is in red wine; clearly, something in red wine is good for you. Maybe several somethings. (Scotch and beer drinkers, and even white wine drinkers, also enjoy a health boost over teetotalers—but do not benefit quite as much as those who consume red wine.)
Meanwhile, research on resveratrol became its own mini-industry, as hundreds of papers were published on the miracle pill that seemed like it might slow down the aging process. It also apparently boosted endurance, causing some members of the Sinclair lab to take it in search of an athletic performance boost. Critics were few and far between, but vocal. Indeed, some of his leading antagonists included fellow alumni of Leonard Guarente’s lab, which must have made reunions awkward. (For more on resveratrol as a supplement, and why it might not actually be the miracle pill it was touted as, see the Appendix, “Things That Might Work.”)
It didn’t matter; Sinclair had already moved beyond resveratrol to much bigger things. About a year and a half after the Nature paper, GlaxoSmithKline plunked down $720 million to buy Sirtris, a startup pharmaceutical company that Sinclair had cofounded. The company was supposed to go on to develop sirtuin-activating drugs that would be better targeted and more specific than resveratrol, which Sinclair dismisses as “a dirty drug.” Sirtris’s new drugs would also be patent-protected, which meant that a drug company could make money from them.
But then… crickets. GSK/Sirtris brought a handful of new drugs into clinical trials, but they fared poorly. One had to be withdrawn because of side effects, and in March 2013, GSK shuttered its Sirtris office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although the company said it had not abandoned the cause completely, only a handful of staffers seemed to be still working on the project.
“It’s a business decision, and not because of the science,” Sinclair told me, a week after GSK had pulled the plug. He hadn’t given up, but he sounded resigned. “I can remember telling my friends in college, we were playing cards, and I said, ‘Do you realize we’re probably the last generation that’s going to live a normal lifespan? Someone’s going to make a breakthrough, and the next generation’s going to live a long, long time. And that sucks, because we were born one generation too early.’ ”
Another reason it “sucks” is because, in the absence of a caloric-restriction pill (which is how resveratrol was billed), then we apparently still have to starve if we want to live longer. But how much hunger does it really take?
To help answer that question, I had sought out Don Dowden. I’d found him on my search for a modern-day Luigi Cornaro. Tall and patrician, he had been a successful patent attorney in Manhattan for decades before retiring to this place north of Boston, which seems to be on a sort of family estate. “He’s interesting,” a friend had said. “He’s older, but he’s very lively.”
I saw instantly what he meant. Dowden is in his early eighties now, and while his skin shows his age, his eyes dance with alertness. We sat down on the shabby-genteel f
urniture in his study, and he told me his story: When he was still in his late twenties, just married and starting out in New York, he happened to read a report by the American Society of Actuaries “that said it was better to be thin than fat,” he recalls.
This was in 1960, when such insights were still novel, and they hit home: He’d gained thirty pounds immediately after getting married, thanks to his wife’s cooking. He decided to try to take the weight off, and his plan was simple: He’d eat less. He also started jogging, which was regarded as a bit eccentric back then—and actually, so was the notion of eating less, particularly in the steak-and-martini milieu of Midtown Manhattan in the early 1960s.
Then, in the early 1980s, he read Roy Walford’s bestseller The 120-Year Diet, and he resolved to be more systematic about it. He joined the Calorie Restriction Society, a group of like-minded people (including Walford) who enjoyed really tiny meals. He soon saw why its membership numbers have never been particularly robust: He threw a party for fellow CR practitioners, and one guy brought a scale to weigh the food. “I weigh myself, but I don’t weigh the food,” he says.
He certainly seems youthful for his age. At eighty-two, he takes no medications and is proud of the fact. He carries 155 pounds on a six-foot-one-inch frame, less than his college weight, he humblebrags, but he does not look emaciated. He kept running into his seventies, when his knees finally gave up on him, and he still goes out for a daily walk in the woods for an hour or ninety minutes. All that’s missing is his wife, who died in 2000 of a neurological disorder at age sixty-five; she had not joined his caloric-restriction diet, he says.