Jim Penman discusses research into reversing the effects of food restriction through pheromones, drug screening of 100,000 compounds, and CRISPR-based epigenetic editing. He frames these as voluntary interventions that could improve wellbeing and mental health without requiring people to eat more.
What actually is happening is we're trying to reverse engineer the effects of food restriction. We know if we food restrict animals, they behave in ways that are good for the species. I suppose you might say they look after their young better, they're more interested in their young, they're more exploratory. They actually, in a sense, in human terms, they're more hard working, they're more innovative, they're better at problem solving. There's many beneficial aspects. So we can't get people to restrict their eating. That's not possible. So what we're trying to do is have some effect. Now there's various ways of doing it. One of the effects we're looking at is pheromones. Food restricted animals actually give out a sort of smell. And if you, if you expose rats to the smells of the bedding of food restricted rats, they tend to act as if they're food restricted, if that makes sense. So we're looking at pheromones that can influence behavior and that's known to be in effect. We're looking at potential drugs that can do it. We're about to launch a project where we're actually mass screening 100,000 different drugs looking for epigenetic effects associated with food restriction. So we're just going masses and masses of different treatments. Some of these new weight loss treatments like WeGovy could actually potentially have this effect. And down the track a bit, we are looking at CRISPR as a possibility. Now, CRISPR is a way these changes. The effects of food restrictions are basically epigenetic. They don't change the genes, but they change the way the genes function. In effect, if you consider a DNA as a sort of a series of little taps spitting out proteins, what epigenetics does is turns the taps on or turns them off. So we have a fairly good idea now of what the epigenetics of food restriction looks like. And so down the track a bit, it should be possible to get a target to go into that particular gene and say turn it off, turn this one on and actually change behavior in a fundamental way. And I stress this is something that people would choose to do because there will be multiple benefits in terms of well being, treatment of even things like mental illness. There's lots and lots of benefits to this kind of food restriction idea. It's good for mind, it's good for body.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
