Reading Passage Adapted from ‘The Serious Search for an Anti-Aging Pill’. Copyright © 2006 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. No treatment on the market today has been proved to slow human aging. But one intervention, consumption of a low-calorie yet nutritionally balanced diet, works incredibly well in a broad range of animals, increasing longevity and prolonging good health. Those findings suggest that caloric restriction could delay aging and increase longevity in humans, too. But what if someone could create a pill that mimicked the physiological effects of eating less without actually forcing people to eat less, a 'caloricrestriction mimetic'? The best-studied candidate for a caloric-restriction mimetic, 2DG (2-deoxy-D-glucose), works by interfering with the way cells process glucose. It has proved toxic at some doses in animals and so cannot be used in humans. But it has demonstrated that chemicals can replicate t...
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