Eric Verdin

  • President and Chief Executive Officer at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging
  • Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Francisco

Credentials

  • MD from University of Liege

Education

  • MD – University of Liege

Affiliations

  • Buck Institute for Research on Aging
  • University of California, San Francisco
  • Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology

Research Focus

  • Role of metabolism and diet in aging
  • Aging and chronic disease
  • Study of sirtuins and NAD in aging and diseases

Notable Publications

  • Role of the energy sensor AMP-activated protein kinase in the metabolic syndrome and in heart disease (2007)
  • NAD+ in aging, metabolism, and neurodegeneration (2015)
  • The NAD+/Sirtuin Pathway Modulates Longevity through Activation of Mitochondrial UPR and FOXO Signaling (2014)

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Awards & Honors

  • Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging (2011)

Key Contributions

  • Identified key roles of sirtuins and NAD in aging and diseases, which has reshaped understanding of aging biology.
  • Discovered the role of metabolism and diet in aging, contributing to the field of nutrigenomics.

Contact

[email protected]

Other Resources

Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 0:24 0
“I think it says what it says based on the projection of where the progression and lifespan that has happened during the last 100 years, which has been about 2 years per decade.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 1:26 0
“One is exercise is to this day the surest, best intervention that we have to increase healthspan and lifespan.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 1:35 0
“The second one is nutrition, and there’s a lot of research going on today trying to understand what is it about nutrition and carbohydrates versus fat, versus proteins, what is the relative role of all these nutrients in your lifespan and healthspan.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 5:25 0
“You can walk into any store and find low-fat diet and low-fat products. Turns out that we really believe that the culprit is more carbohydrates.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 7:09 0
“the carbohydrate intake and the insulin signaling pathway, these things, carbohydrates regulate that, but also you limit your carbohydrate intake when you’re fasting, right?”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 7:48 0
“Intermittent fasting, episodic fasting can actually illicit a response in our bodies and many animal models that are protective against aging.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 8:30 0
“So, one is decreasing carbohydrate intake. So, that would lead to a decrease in insulin signaling. Second one is restricting protein intake, which would actually lead to decreased mTOR signaling and so on.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 8:43 0
“The third one is induction of ketosis, which is a small nutrient which is generated by your liver during the fasting process, and all works indicates that just ketosis and a ketogenic diet might have beneficial effect all by itself.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 9:06 0
“Your lab recently published a paper where you had taken male mice and given them a cyclic ketogenic diet. So, that started in mid-life?”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 11:24 0
“The most remarkable thing we saw is that these older mice on the ketogenic diet showed actually better memory than younger mice, and certainly we did not see the loss of memory function that one would normally see associated with the aging process.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 14:34 0
“you are fasting, at least for four hours, the only way you can make glucose is from proteins. And so if you’re in a prolonged fast, you start digesting your muscles to make proteins, to make glucose, and you don’t wanna lose all of your proteins and all of your muscles.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 14:53 0
“the glucose-sparing effect of beta-hydroxybutyrate is to spare muscle mass if you’re fasting.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 16:41 0
“Butyrate was the first known or first identified inhibitor of HDACs, histone deacetylases, which are epigenetic regulators, and so that suggested that maybe beta-hydroxybutyrate might be an endogenous regulator of these HDACs.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 19:05 0
“I was reading a paper, discussing these concentrations, and was astounded. I thought, 'Well, millimolar concentration, this means that it might really work as an HDAC inhibitor.'”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 21:48 0
“There are a lot of brain effects linked to ketogenic diet.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 22:15 0
“There's one in the PPAR-alpha gene which is important for the whole process of making ketone bodies and that people have that they actually can't do that very well, and so it can be sort of dangerous, and they can have inflammation.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 22:49 0
“I think there was a decrease in insulin, obviously, and IGF-1, and mTOR activity went down.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 25:23 0
“A number of people who go on a ketogenic diet tend to compensate by increasing their protein intake, which might actually put them at risk for exactly what you're describing, increase IGF-1 signaling and increase actually risk of cancer.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 26:06 0
“Humans sort of naturally gravitate to eating more protein when they're eating less food.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 27:39 0
“We take calorie restriction, for example, as a universal modification that will increase lifespan. It's not what is seen in the literature, and I would say the same is going to be even more true for humans.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 33:09 0
“NAD has emerged as one of these critical intermediary metabolites. Think of ketone bodies, NAD, all, I call them currencies.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 33:34 0
“And NAD is a hydride acceptor. While we oxidize foods, it can actually serve as an acceptor for electron, and then it can transfer them, for example, to the respiratory chain.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 34:58 0
“So, out of these discoveries came the idea that maybe we should replenish the decreasing levels of NAD, and so this has yielded some discoveries, such as nicotinamide riboside, nicotinamide mononucleotide, which are now being taken by a lot of people with the hope that they will, you know, correct some of these problems.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 32:09 0
“I've been getting less sleep than usual, because I'm a new mother, and that's what I'm trying to effect, but it'll be interesting to see.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 36:20 0
“So one of the main enzymes that repairs damage as we age, DNA damage, PARP, requires NAD, and it’s like if you’re accumulating more and more damage as you age, you have to repair more of that damage, and the more and more damage you’re having, maybe it’s sucking the NAD sort of like almost a triage where you got to keep repairing that damage, so then other things like the mitochondria suffer.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 36:42 0
“I completely agree, and so there are two major theories right now that have been proposed in terms of why does NAD go down. One is activated PARP, and, indeed, as we age, we accumulate DNA damage. That’s been shown, especially in the brain recently, and so the idea is, by activating PARP, you constantly deplete your NAD levels.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 37:14 0
“we can get NAD from the food, but also we salvage the one that we utilize, and the salvage pathway has been shown to becoming paralyzed while you age.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 37:25 0
“There’s an enzyme called NAMPT that has received a lot of attention. That enzyme tends to be inhibited by chronic inflammation and a high-fat diet.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 38:20 0
“Mitochondria play a very important role in aging as well. Many of the aging pathways that we know, be it the unfolded protein response, or mitochondrial biogenesis, all point to efficient mitochondria as one of the key ways to stay young.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 39:26 0
“Nicotinamide riboside? Yes, for example, the paper we’ve published was focused on the age-associated or noise-induced loss of hearing. So, if you actually subject mice or humans to very acute noise, they have a dose-dependent loss of hearing. You can protect the mice completely from this effect by supplementing with NAD.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 45:08 0
“So, the message is that nutrient feeding or, you know, low histone acetyltransferase activity or high sirtuin activity all lead to low protein acetylation, which is beneficial.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 45:13 0
“Rhonda: And doing the ketogenic diet? Dr. Verdin: Regulates one step above.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 45:31 0
“Rhonda: What about autophagy with the ketogenic diet? Dr. Verdin: It would be activated, because clearly it’s a fasting mimicking diet, but we haven’t really studied it directly.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 48:04 0
“Dr. Verdin: I have tried, and I’ve been on it for about a year. It’s hard to stay on. I called it a somewhat antisocial diet, because you can’t really drink alcohol, you can’t eat a lot of the things that we base, you know, our social interactions on. No breads, no pasta, and very little fruits.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 50:22 0
“You know, I try to eat all of my food within a 10-hour window, and I find that that's the best...”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 50:27 0
“Fourteen hours fasting. You know, I think maybe you can answer this question for me about, you know, it takes anywhere between, like, 12 to 36 hours to deplete your liver glycogen or something like that.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 50:41 0
“Actually, it could be faster. Well, instead, from four to six hours, you actually deplete most of it, yes.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 50:49 0
“Physical exercise will deplete it much more quickly.”

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Dr. Eric Verdin on Ketogenic Diet Longevity, Beta-Hydroxybutyrate, HDAC Inhibitors & NAD+
Enhancing Health and Longevity Through Diet, Exercise, and Fasting 51:04 0
“So, doing a 14-hour fast every night is something that I at least try to practice.”

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