The Forever Healthy Foundation has recently launched the Rejuvenation Now project, and it has just published a detailed analysis of fisetin, a naturally occurring compound present in strawberries and other fruit and sold as a dietary supplement.
There is a lot of hype, pseudoscience, and outright lies attached to the supplement industry and how it markets its products, which makes it challenging to make informed choices when it comes to dietary supplements. A goal of the Rejuvenation Now project is to create a comprehensive database of supplements, complete with risk-reward analyses, in order to help people make optimal choices for health and longevity.
There are some compounds available now that could potentially help protect against or slow down some aspects of aging, and this is particularly true for the senescent cell-clearing compounds known as senolytics. There are a number of potential senolytics already available, some of them in the form of supplements, that might prove useful in combating the ill health of old age, and fisetin is the first of them to get investigated by Rejuvenation Now.
What is fisetin?
Fisetin is a naturally occurring flavonol and part of the flavonoid family of polyphenols. Fisetin also acts as a pigment and influences the color of various fruits and vegetables. It can be found in many common fruits and vegetables, although the amounts vary considerably.
| Fruit/Vegetable | Amount in µg/g |
| Strawberry | 160 |
| Apple | 26.9 |
| Persimmon | 10.6 |
| Lotus Root | 5.8 |
| Onion | 4.8 |
| Grape | 3.9 |
| Kiwi | 2.0 |
| Peach | 0.6 |
| Cucumber | 0.1 |
As this table shows, strawberries have a much higher concentration of this flavonol than other fruits and vegetables, which is likely why people associate it with this fruit in particular.
Conclusion
Previous animal studies suggest that fisetin is able to destroy the senescent cells that accumulate in aging mice and thus reduce chronic inflammation and improve health. However, the data for humans is much less clear, as noted by this analysis, and there are currently two ongoing Phase 2 human trials at Mayo Clinic aiming to find out if it has a similar senolytic effect in humans. It is likely that the results of these trials will be published in the next year or so, and we will find out if the effects observed in mice translate to us.
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