Switch on your "longevity gene"

This is Why the "Restricted Calorie Diet" is getting so much hype in the media.

Turns out that if you starve mice, giving them a diet with one-third fewer calories than they would like to eat, their lifespan increases by about 30 percent. Later studies revealed that this effect wasn’t limited to mice: Calorie-restricted diets produced similar results in many life forms, from single-celled organisms to plants and mammals.

Very recently, scientists found an explanation for this mysterious phenomenon: a family of genes called sirtuins ("silent information regulator proteins"). Sirtuins kick in under conditions of severe stress, bringing about an evolutionarily advantageous transformation. They transmit signals to every cell in your body, and the processes that lead to cell death slow to a crawl, buying your body more time to wait out the famine until things improve.

Most people think of genetics as written in stone. You have the genes you inherited, and that’s it. The discovery of sirtuins pointed to another amazing fact: Certain genes can be awakened and called upon to change your body in the course of your lifetime.

You’re probably saying to yourself, "Do I have to starve myself to live longer?" Good point. The problem of how to "wake up" sleeping sirtuin genes had scientists stumped for years. They had to find some other way to flip the aging "off switch."

The answer to switch on your longevity gene: Resveratrol