Thanks to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and the abundance of sugars and carbohydrates on every supermarket shelf around the globe, high blood s… - David A. Sinclair

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." R. P. Feynman,

Death by death, the world sheds ideas that need to be shed. Ipso facto, birth by birth, the world is offered an opportunity to do things better.

Like sirtuins, scientists have found TOR — called mTOR in mammals — in every organism in which they've looked for it. Like that of sirtuins, mTOR activity is exquisitely regulated by nutrients. And like the sirtuins, mTOR can signal cells in stress to hunker down and improve survival by boosting such activities as DNA repair, reducing inflammation caused by senescent cells, and, perhaps its most important function, digesting old proteins.27 When all is well and fine, TOR is a master driver of cell growth. It senses the amount of amino acids that is available and dictates how much protein is created in response. When it is inhibited, though, it forces cells to hunker down, dividing less and reusing old cellular components to maintain energy and extend survival — sort of like going to the junkyard to find parts with which to fix up an old car rather than buying a new one, a process called autophagy. When our ancestors were unsuccessful in bringing down a woolly mammoth and had to survive on meager rations of protein, it was the shutting down of mTOR that permitted them to survive.