PharmacoNutrition Reviewed

Having been working for more than 3 years in an EU-funded project on Local Mediterranen Diet, the FAO warning that populations in the Mediterranean basin are abandoning their traditional food habits, doesn’t come to me as a surprise. One of the main objectives of the above mentioned project, in fact, has been the conservation of traditional food and health knowledge.
The latest FAO analysis was presented at a recent meeting of the California Mediterranen Consortium.

“The European diet has become too fat, too salty and too sweet,” he concluded, adding that the traditional diet, which some advocates have campaigned to be placed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list, has “declined into a moribund state”. (read more)

Today’s post is a supplement to the list of recent papers on telomeres/telomerase Chris summarized over at Ouroboros a few days ago.

The article by Perez-Rivero et al. deals with the consequences of telomerase deficiency. Although aging as a parameter has not been assessed the outcome of the study sheds further light on the importance of telomerase in cell physiology, especially the regulation of oxidative stress:

“Comparison with wild type (WT) mouse emryonic fibroblasts (MEF) showed that mice lacking telomerase activity (Terc-/-) MEF had greater oxidant damage, showing higher superoxide anion and hydrogen peroxide production and lower catalase activity. Restoration of telomerase activity in Terc-/- MEF increased catalase expression and activity. TGF-β1 and collagen type IV levels were higher in Terc-/- than in WT MEF. TGF-β1 promoter activity decreased when Terc-/- MEF were incubated with exogenous catalase, suggesting that catalase deficiency is the cause of the TGF-β1 increase. Similar results were obtained in vivo.”