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Low-Cal Diet Extends Life... As Long as You Don't Eat
There has been a lot of research recently showing that a restricted calorie diet can extend the lifespans of various creatures. Sadly, it seems that as soon as they start eating again, the benefits are lost.
Kind of redefines the term "lifetime" too
I mean hey, a complete starvation diet is one to last a lifetime!
(a very short lifetime)
on your willpower... would that more people had the same drive to stay fit.
However, instead of willpower, people are going the bariatric surgery route... I've seen more TV news magazine reports recently about this trend than I've ever seen before. Danger, Will Robinson.
Apart from the obvious complications of surgery (bleeding, wound dehissence, infection, obstruction, etc, etc), stomach stapling changes your lifestyle permanently. Some of these things would be real burden for slashdotters... for instance:
You become nable to drink during meals (your stomach is so small after the surgery, it cannot hold both food AND drink)
Carbonated beverages are to be avoided (same reason as above... no Mountain Dew, no Jolt, no Bawls.)
No alcohol (beer will stretch your now-tiny stomach as much as regular carbonated beverages). Also, about half of consumed alcohol is broken down in the stomach via alcohol dehydrogenase... theoretically, you could find that your whiskey sours pack about double the punch as before (not necessarily a good thing).
You are also not necessarily done with surgery after your stapling. Ever see a person who has lost 150lbs or so? They have skin folds just hanging off of them... plastic surgery is required to get rid of the redundant skin. The potential also exists for nutritional deficiencies, like B-12. To be fair, the liver stores a fair quantity of B-12, so this might only show up 10-15 years down the road. Bottom line: The true long-term effects of this operation are not known.
I don't even know what to say to the people who purposely make themselves fatter so they can qualify for the surgery... it's madness.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Hunger is one of the strongest drives in human, and it overshadows much of what else you might be doing, so I'd agree that the quality of life would be drastically lowered by a very strict low-calorie diet.
It used to be 'common knowledge' that fully differentiated cells of a given tissue type would each live for a specific length of time and then die.
I argued that this was not so. I suggested that fully differentiated cells of a given tissue type would divide a specific number of times and then stop dividing (Hayflick Limit). I hypothesized the existence of a counter in each cell that kept track of how many more times that cell could divide. Today, those counters are called Tellomeres.
The reason you live longer on a low calorie diet is because your individual cells don't have the fuel to go through their life cycles as quickly. Give them the fuel and they speed up again.
So the idea of waiting until 48 hours before your natural dead would not extend your life by much at all. Sorry.
Tellomeres are like a chain of knots at one end of the DNA. Each time the DNA divides, there's one less knot on the chain. If the cell does not become cancerous, when there are no more knots, the cell ceases to divide. The real answer to life extension will be when we learn how to add knots back onto the Tellomeres.
I expect this problem to be solved within the next 15 years. At that point, it will become possible to slowly roll back the age of the body as, for example, 46th generation smooth muscle cells divide and become 17th generation smooth muscle cells. Over a period of several years your body would effectively become younger.
Read any Biochemistry text book (Voet & Voet is/was a good one) on metabolism and you'll BEGIN to understand the foundation for the work just published. The lower the calories consumed, the less oxidation is taking place in our bodies. This is why junk food, Ho-Hos, Twinkies, bleached white bread, Softbatch cookies, gummy bears & worms, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and basically all modern refined sugars ARE BAD FOR YOU. These "foods" are pure energy and have little if any nutritional value. When these foods are consumed, the sugars enter the blood stream where insulin and sugars combine, enter our cells, and are metabolized. For some people, the sugars are converted to fat for later use. For others (including myself who is hypoglycemic) the sugars are burned immediately. What happens when you burn things? They (the fuels) oxidize, and our cells also sustain some oxidative damage, leading to decreased life span. What should you do to live a long high-quality and healthy life? Don't eat junk food, exercise, eat lots of fish and dark green leafy vegatables, take vitamins, and minimize the stress in your life. Eating beef is one of the fastest ways of getting iron into our bodies for preventing amemia. Taking iron vitamin supplements is very much less efficient since the iron isn't absorbed as well into the body. In beef the iron is bound in hemoglobin (blood). Our digestive enzymes are designed for tearing apart hemogloblin and efficiently extracting the iron from it. In vitamin form, iron is usually a salt and not very soluble in water, hence most of it passes right through the digestive system.
This study is not really surprising at all, but is very useful. It's just that someone finally took the time to do a research project and publish their findings.