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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.
studies have shown that research causes cancer in rats.
Kind of redefines the term "lifetime" too
I mean hey, a complete starvation diet is one to last a lifetime!
(a very short lifetime)
Here's the google link directly to the story.
- b
Research also shows that eggs are bad for you .. no wait, make that good. Wait, here is a new study....
Who knows what to believe half the time? A low-calorie diet is good if you need to lose weight, plain and simple. Otherwise, eat the amount of calories you need to maintain your weight. It's not an exact science, but if you avoid the junk food and make half an effort to eat sensibly, there shouldn't be much to worry about.
We'll live longer if we don't eat, drink, smoke, fuck and so on...
/rumagent
But what is the point of having life if you don't live it? Boring people may live longer, but they live less.
... it just seems that way
That brings up another issue... when does life stop being worth living?
This is the question that the euthanasia folks would dearly love society to answer... but they can't; it's an individual decision. This is part of the drive behind people getting living wills, durable powers of attorney for healthcare, and advance directive, etc.
I'm not quite to mid-life, without a single health problem. I run, work out, don't smoke, or drink to excess... and I have a living will, AND advance directives. Why? Because, as a physician, I have SEEN life that's not worth living (at least it wouldn't be for me), and I would never want to get to that point. I encourage people, even healthy ones, to think about a living will... and to have the necessary conversations with their loved ones and significant others. Once you're critically ill/vegitative, unable to make that choice for yourself, and others are trying to deal with the emotional trauma of your incapacitation... that is NOT the time to attempt an objective conversation about it.
Yes, you can diet, and deprive yourself of all the "good things" in life, but is that really a life worth living, particularly if it only buys you a small, arbitrary gain? Again, it's an individual decision.
I think I'll keep eating my cheeseburgers.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
On my "lifesyle" change I had lost 60 pounds. I wobbled a bit and gained 5 back, but I'l losing 1-2 pounds a week again.
There is one things that keeps getting hammered into my head.
We don't need all the food we eat to survive or even be full. Once your stomach learns what it needs, it won't keep asking for more more more.
People with the "supersize" this and the "extra large" that are slowly killing themselves each time they order more than they need.
But let's face it. I'd rather die in my 60's then to live 20 years longer in a nursing home.
Just remember slashdotters, you can have ONE slice of pizza for dinner and still be ok for your daily caloric intake.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Studies have shown that male animals (of various species) that are kept separated from females all their lifes can live up to 20% longer. In other words having no sex lets you live longer. The combination of forced abstinence and strict diet can add decades to a person's life.
As a Belgian Radio announcer commented when this result was published, this finally explains why Catholic priests have a surprising tendency to die around 28.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
How was this post "Informative"? Read the article, folks! The "diet" in question has nothing to do with weight loss. It has to do with length of life.
A study on dogs showed a 16% increase in life span for a calorie restricted diet -- thats a couple of extra dog years or perhaps decade or two of more life for a person. Sounds good, right? The problem was that the dogs had to eat 25% less than normal to get 16% more life than normal.
As someone who enjoys his kibble, I would argue that less chow = lower quality of life. So for 25% less quality of life, I get 16% more quantity of life. Sounds like a bad deal to me.
Moreover, the report said nothing about the energy levels of these poor long-starving mutts -- do starved creatures have any energy for fun and games? Due to the realities of physiology, I'd bet that a 25% reduction in energy input leads to a more that 25% reduction in energy available for discretionary, fun activities. On a restricted diet, a greater fraction of the meager intake is diverted to basic maintenance of the body.
I'm not saying that obesity is not a real killer of both quantity and quality of life. I'm only saying that restricted calorie diets come with tradeoffs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
C'mon people, I like to eat as much as the next guy or gal! The point is, just stop stuffing yourself silly--restricted calories != starvation, just limiting your intake so that you're not pushing yourself past full when you eat. I'm so sick of seeing fat Americans everywhere I go. We really have to do something about our problem. It's gross and embarressing, and *extremely* unhealthy.
Look both ways before you cross the road.
When Hillary Clinton asked Strom Thurmond his secret to staying fit, he replied that he never ate anything larger than an egg. I guess it worked for him.
"Extremism in defense of liberty is more fun."
Actually, this info is REALLY useful. Perhaps it is not useful to John Doe, but researchers can use this fly model to study and attempt to identify the causes of this effect. Because pesky organizations like PETA dont care about flies and they are cheap to work with, coming up with a fly system to study these effects is really important. the real question is how this reseach translates into humans. That is, does the fly model appropriately represent a physiological state in humans?
Don't forget to get up and move every now and then, as well. People don't realize that this is a major factor in health. Why does the Atkins diet work for so many people? Because you don't need carbohydrates if you sit in an office all day. The food pyramid should practically say, "For an active lifestyle."
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Research showing the life extending benefits of a low calorie diet has been known for a long while. What wasn't known was exactly why it works. One leading theory is that eating food (which contains oxidants) led to the gradual breakdown of cells and other important biological structures. This study seems to suggest otherwise.
If the reduction in the aging process was simply caused by a reduction in oxidation of cells, that means you wouldn't expect to see the same benefit for someone who suddenly went on a restricted calorie diet. That changes the focus to suggest that restricting the diet triggers biological pathways within the organism that has this protective effect.
It may be something very simple, or it may be far more complex. Reduced diet organisms tend to not reproduce and generally slow down. It could be that simply being able to reproduce can lead to forms of mortality that shortens lifespan (e.g. it causes cancer, takes energy away from cell repair, or something else). If it's something that basic, I could see a drug therapy that everyone starts taking after a certain age that switches people's metabolism into "restricted calorie" mode, even if they're eating normally.
Of course, these things are rarely that simple. Even if it was possible to create such a drug, it may simply make people feel too bad (starving isn't usually fun). The few individuals who have decided to go on a restricted calorie diet tend to have pretty poor quality of life, not being able to do really active things or enjoy a meal.
Finally, the research I've seen that relates to long-lived men tend to have one thing in common. They are all in excellent physical shape, regularly exercising an excessive amount. Women evidently have more flexability and don't have to be quite so active, but men seem to need a large amount of physical exercise. It could be that there are two different paths to longevity, one involving eating little and staying still, and the other eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly. Me, I'm going with the second approach. Food tastes too good to me.
(and yes, I do have a master's degree in biology, though it is collecting dust these days)
I think some of the people here are missing the point of the research.
Scientists have known that restricting your intake of food helps leads to a longer lifetime. Note that the emphasis is not on eating correctly or better, but just less. Based on my limited biochemistry/metabolism knowledge, this is thought to be a consequence of how your GI system breaks down food and the long-term effect of the potent chemical processes on your body; this is also briefly restated in the article.
Where this differs is that they have shown that benefits can be had at any time in an organism's life cycle, indicating that something else is afoot. So no, this is not yet another study that says you should go on the Atkins/grapefruit/carrot soup/wicker chair & bagels diet.
They've seen this effect on a whole range of animals. They've done this on rats and have even tried it out on monkeys.
One article from this NIH site seemed to indicate that, despite prolonging an animal's lifespan, caloric-restriction diets didn't seem to do anything about cognitive decline.
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.
Okay... we've uncovered yet another truth in nature... organisms are designed to withstand famine.
Although the human intellect has improved over the millenia, the genetic script for our bodies has been nearly unchanged since the last ice ages. We only see organisms today that can resist famine because evolution has weeded out those strains that couldn't survive. If the creature can't find food or water, it's in the best interest to "pause" some life functions so you can survive until nourishment can be found.
Our bodies are evolved to be fat-storage machines; we have to, because nature can never guarantee the next meal. Our noses, though not as good as some other creatures, are still very receptive to spoiled food. Salt tastes good because our body needs it for cellular processes. Sugar tastes good because it's high energy "food" rare in nature.
But we've broken the cycle. Our insulin proceses the sugars, but never before has so much sugar been available, so now we see diabetes where our insulin receptors are over-exposed and develop a tolerance. We still have fight-or-flight mechanisms, but most of us live such a mundane existance, we release stress chemicals over the slightest event. Then we try these starvation diets, and our bodies don't burn the fat, because it thinks there's real hard times ahead, not realizing we have more food than we can eat.
It's a battle of intellect over evolved chemistry... but slowly we understand what is really going on behind the scenes, and with knowledge comes the power to correct it.
...if you move seminal fluid daily by whatever means necessary.
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.
I recently watched a tv show from National Geographic with the name Scientific American Frontiers : Fat and Happy (Episode Title.)
They said that you must get a low calorie (or measuring the average calorie for your daily needs like 2000 Calories) but *high* nutrition.
You do not just starve yourself but you will need to eat foods that have low caloric content but high vitamins and minerals.
They are still doing tests for mice and monkeys. They are still ongoing. They are comparing two groups with one having a regular diet and the other having a low calorie but high nutrition diet. Of course, the one having the higher nutrition and low calorie is doing better (because they are already old.)
I think it is not very difficult to follow a diet this way (maybe hard for Americans because of their lifestyle with too much fast food and fat full foods.) You can still enjoy eating good food but you must manage what you eat.
If you are going to start a diet, *consult a physician.* Based on the show, they will need to get your metabolic rate, etc, to determine your daily neeeds without starving you to death or getting you undernourished.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
Oxygen is a pretty harsh molecule/element/radical, and their hypothesis was that it basically damaged the cells/DNA - so the more you received of it, the more oxidation damage your cells received. They did not look into the effects of exercise when I was there.
..........FULL STOP.