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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.3102
igaa057.3102
Abstracts
Session 7665 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Nutritional Ecology, Nutritional Geometry, and Aging Research
Raubenheimer David 1 Simpson Stephen 2 Couteur David Le 2 1 
University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
2 
University of Sydney, Camperdown, New South Wales, Australia
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”846 846
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
Substantial advances have been made in understanding both evolutionary and mechanistic aspects of biological ageing, but the two areas remain poorly integrated. I suggest that a greater emphasis on ecology can help to integrate evolutionary and mechanistic research on ageing, by providing insight into the interface between biological mechanisms and the environments in which they evolved. Among the most salient aspects of the environment relevant to ageing is nutrition. And yet in the bulk of ageing research nutrition is coarsely represented as dietary restriction or caloric restriction, without consideration for which components of the diet or which energetic substrates are driving the observed effects. I show how a method developed in nutritional ecology, called the nutritional geometry framework, can help to understand the nutritional interactions of animals with their environments, by explicitly distinguishing the roles of calories, individual nutrients and nutrient balance. Part of a symposium sponsored by the Nutrition Interest Group.