LIVE LONGER ON A HEALTHY DIET AT ANY AGE

October 9, 2025

Fruit flies are sharing life lessons. Researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that switching a fruit fly’s diet to a low-calorie one is a reliable way to extend lifespan, even for old flies in ill health. In fact, old, obese flies get healthier and live longer if put on a diet. If the effect holds true for humans, it would mean it’s never too late for obese people to improve their health with diet. For the fruit fly study, researchers mimicked the modern highly processed food diet of humans with a high-calorie, high-sugar, high-protein diet. Switching these obese flies to a low-calorie diet, even very late in life. dramatically changed their metabolisms and extended their lives. The research was led by geneticist Blanka Rogina in the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences and the Institute for Systems Genomics.

“The remarkable finding of this study is that even after living a significant portion of their lives on a high-calorie diet, flies can gain the benefits of life span extension by simply switching to a low-calorie diet.” Commented by Brenton Gravelcy, Ph.D., Co-rescarcher, Professor, and Chair, Genetics and Genome Sciences

More details can be found here.png