Chandegra Bhakti, Tang Jocelyn Lok Yee, Chi Haoyu, Alic Nazif
Institute of Healthy Ageing and Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
Aging (Albany NY). 2017 Dec 4;9(12):2521-2528. doi: 10.18632/aging.101335.
Lifespan and health in older age are strongly influenced by diet. Feeding diets high in sugar has increasingly been used as an experimental model to understand the physiological effects of unhealthy, contemporary human diets. Several metabolic parameters and physiological responses to nutrition are known to be dependent on the sex of the animal. However, sexual dimorphism in the responses to high-sugar diets in fruit flies has not been examined. Here we show that a high-sugar diet in elicits sexually dimorphic effects on feeding behaviour, starvation resistance and lifespan. Females feed less on such diets, while males feed more, and these feeding responses may have secondary consequences. Females, more than males, gain the ability to resist periods of starvation from high-sugar diets, indicating that the female response to excess sugar may be geared towards surviving food shortages in early life. At the same time, female lifespan is more susceptible to the detrimental effects of high sugar diets. Our study reveals differences between sexes in their responses to sugar-rich diets, indicating the fruit fly could be used as a model to understand the sexually dimorphic features of human metabolic health.
老年时期的寿命和健康状况受到饮食的强烈影响。高糖饮食越来越多地被用作一种实验模型，以了解不健康的现代人类饮食的生理影响。已知一些代谢参数和对营养的生理反应取决于动物的性别。然而，果蝇对高糖饮食反应中的性别差异尚未得到研究。在此，我们表明，高糖饮食对果蝇的进食行为、抗饥饿能力和寿命产生了性别差异效应。雌性果蝇在这种饮食上的进食量较少，而雄性果蝇进食量较多，这些进食反应可能会产生次要后果。与雄性相比，雌性果蝇从高糖饮食中获得了抵抗饥饿时期的能力，这表明雌性对过量糖分的反应可能是为了在生命早期应对食物短缺时生存下来。与此同时，雌性果蝇的寿命更容易受到高糖饮食有害影响的影响。我们的研究揭示了两性对富含糖的饮食反应的差异，表明果蝇可以用作了解人类代谢健康性别差异特征的模型。
