Dietary restriction increases variability in longevity

Abstract

Nutritional environments, particularly those experienced during early life, are hypothesized to affect longevity. A recent cross-Taxa meta-Analysis found that, depending upon circumstance, average longevitymay be increased or decreased by early-life dietary restriction. Unstudied are the effects of diet during development on among-individual variance in longevity. Here, we address this issue using emerging methods for meta-Analysis of variance. We found that, in general, standard deviation (s.d.) in longevity is around 8% higher under early-life dietary restriction than a standard diet. The effects became especially profound when dietary insults were experienced prenatally (s.d. increased by 29%) and/ or extended into adulthood (s.d. increased by 36.6%). Early-life dietary restriction may generate variance in longevity as a result of increased variance in resource acquisition or allocation, but the mechanisms underlying these largely overlooked patterns clearly warrant elucidation.