Spermidine: The Longevity Compound Hiding in Your Wheat Germ

Spermidine has an unfortunate name, and I'll deal with that first. Yes, it was first isolated from where you think. No, that's not where it comes from in practice. It's in wheat germ, aged cheese, mushrooms and natto, and your own cells make it every day without consulting you.

So why is a molecule you can get from a porridge topping one of the most currently talked-about compounds in ageing research? That largely comes down to a 2009 paper from Frank Madeo's lab in Graz, published in Nature Cell Biology. They fed spermidine to yeast, flies, worms and human immune cells, and in all of them the same thing happened: the cells started clearing out their own damaged components faster and more thoroughly. YES! - Autophagy! The yeast and the flies also lived longer. That was enough to get the longevity field's attention, and it hasn't let go since.

Autophagy, in plain English

The clearing-out process is called autophagy, which means self-eating. It sounds grim but it's the opposite - it's the cell's housekeeping, the mechanism that finds worn-out proteins and tired mitochondria and recycles them for parts. It also slows down as we get older. A guy called Yoshinori Ohsumi won the 2016 Nobel Prize for mapping how it works, and a good chunk of ageing research since then has been about finding ways to turn it back up.

Fasting does it, which is one of the reasons I go three days without food every January, and I've written about that elsewhere. But three days without food is a hard sell for most people, and the interest in spermidine is that in laboratory models it appears to flip the same switch without the hunger.

The human evidence is thinner. The best of it comes from Bruneck, a town in the Tyrol where researchers tracked the diets of around 800 people for twenty years. The group eating the most spermidine had lower mortality over that period than the group eating the least. It's observational, so it can't prove cause - people who eat a lot of wheat germ and aged cheese probably differ from people who don't in a dozen other ways - but it pointed the same direction as the lab work, and that's why the research has kept going.

Why it comes paired with astaxanthin

The product we stock isn't spermidine on its own. It's Spermidine with Astaxanthin from Feel Supreme, and the pairing is actually really smart.

Astaxanthin is the pigment that makes salmon pink, and flamingos for that matter. It's produced by a microalga as a kind of sunscreen when its pond dries up, and it's one of the most-studied antioxidants in the literature. It's fat-soluble, which is why you tend to see it formulated alongside things people take daily over the long haul. I've covered the astaxanthin and NMN combination already if you want the longer version of that.

The logic for putting the two together is that they're studied along different pathways, so they complement rather than duplicate each other. 

You can also just eat it

I'd be a poor shopkeeper if I didn't say this, and a worse one if I didn't say it honestly: wheat germ is by some distance the densest ordinary food source, and a heaped tablespoon on your porridge costs almost nothing. Aged cheese, mushrooms and lentils all add to it.

What a capsule gets you is a known dose, every day, without wondering whether the bag of wheat germ at the back of the press has gone rancid. In my experience it usually has. Who actually eats wheatgerm, seriously?

What we stock, and what it costs

Sixty capsules, one a day, so a two-month supply for €64.95. Feel Supreme are a UK manufacturer we've dealt with directly for years, which counts for something in a category where you often can't tell who actually made the thing. It sits in our longevity range alongside NMN and the NR we carry, and if you're trying to work out which of those is which, the NMN versus NR post is the place to start. 

And if you came here because you heard David Sinclair mention it on a podcast - he does - I've gone through his full stack and what's actually available in Ireland separately. Worth reading before you buy anything, including this.

This article is for information only and is not medical advice. Food supplements are not a substitute for a varied and balanced diet and a healthy lifestyle. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication or have a medical condition, talk to your doctor before starting any supplement.