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Calorie Restriction May Not Extend Lifespan
sciencehabit writes "Slash your food intake and you can live dramatically longer — at least if you're a mouse or a nematode. But a major study designed to determine whether this regimen, known as caloric restriction, works in primates suggests that it improves monkeys' health but doesn't extend their lives. Researchers not involved with the new paper say the results are still encouraging. Although the monkeys didn't evince an increase in life span, both studies show a major improvement in 'health span,' or the amount of time before age-related diseases set in. 'I certainly wouldn't give up on calorie restriction as a health promoter' based on these findings, says molecular biologist Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge."
...McDonalds Corporation?
I'd rather be fat and die early having eaten the things I liked, than old, skinny and never enjoyed a triple bacon burger with extra cheese.
If you looks at the CR/longevity studies, it turns out that most of the ad-lib fed rats die of kidney failure, where the CR rats die of cardiovascular, neoplasty, and other causes. I suspect that standard rat chow is very good for turning baby rats into big rats, but maybe not so good at maintaining an adult rat.
Well, if it makes people healthier, will being healthier not increase lifespan?
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Olympic atheletes consume unbelievable calories but exercise like crazy. They don't do it their whole lives, but I'd be curious to know what the outcome is for individuals who have an atheletic youth. Actually, it would probably be better to do such a study on people who are simply avid exercisers as opposed to the very top tier. It's a more common condition and less likely to have outliers like doping. Do you get better health from high calorie, high exercise or does the body wear out from processing so much fuel?
I've been following this diet 3 days on and 4 days off for 3 weeks and it's doing fine so far. On the off days I eat what I usually would, plus a bit more and weight has been falling off of me. I also feel more energetic and my wife deifinitely approves. It may or may not extend life but I'm losing weight and feeling healthier. I'm hoping this diet will delay the onset of the diseases of a prosperous old age (obesity, diabetes, heart disease etc.) for a good long time.
When I read about calorific restriction years ago one comment was "more study is needed to assess the impact of restricted diets on resistance to infection and recovery from disease". Historically it has been people with poverty-restricted diets that tended to die at an early age from TB, influenza, etc. Obviously there is a big difference between a poverty-restricted diet and a calorie restricted diet that is tailored to supply the necessary variety, micro-nutrients, and vitamins - but there is still a possibility that those on restricted diets could live a healthier life until they are wiped out by an infection. Does anyone know whether further study has been made in this area?
This study proves that further calorie restriction doesn't extend the lifespan compared to an already healthy diet. *Both* though extend the lifespan compared to eating enough to become obese.
I'm just saying this because there'll be enough people who will take this as a prove that over-eating is fine. It isn't.
By the way, a diet consisting of all the fruits, vegetables and meat you can eat is totally fine. It's very hard to become obese when you avoid sugars, starch and other carbohydrates. Sadly, almost everything ready-made you can buy is full to the brim of these.
So... restricted caloric intake results in your being healthier (less cancer etc.) throughout your life if you're a monkey but being healthier does not correlate to a increased life span? They didn't control for diet between the two groups only calories (groups ate entirely different things not just less) and the group that was healthier had monkeys that originated at least in part from a difference geographical region.
Calories (noun) - Tiny creatures that live in your closet and sew your clothes a little bit tighter every night.
It might turn out that it's not caloric restriction that's important, but periodic fasting.
There is research showing that even if you keep your overall food intake (and body weight) constant, but **fast on alternate days**, you can improve blood glucose and insulin levels
Check it:
http://www.pnas.org/content/100/10/6216.full
I am observant Hedonist, and I am glad that science finally stopped this assault on my religious freedoms.
I don't. I have to restrict them, because my knees are very sensitive to even extra pound. It's the matter of limping or not, not a lifespan.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Alternatively you can reword this finding like so: overeating causes health problems, so don't.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
I lost 40 lbs in about a year by reducing starchy carb calories and increasing fat calories and so have a bunch of my friends. It works.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
This is not surprising news. The lifespan may not be increased, but the quality of life may be better. The example that comes to my mind (I use it because it's the only one I know anything about) are the monks on Mt. Athos. At most of the monasteries they eat two modest meals per day which are mostly vegetarian (they do eat fish on certain days). The monks are typically in great health and maladies such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are very rare, so their quality of life is pretty good. Nevertheless, most die at the typical time, around 80 years of age.
Proverbs 21:19
"the team found that none of the Maryland monkeys that started calorie restriction when they were young have developed cancer."
The problem is that people read the headline thinking, oh ok now being overweight isn't a problem. In fact that is exactly what my morning new people said on the air today! They're not saying being fat is fine now or that restricting calories will not help you lose weight. They're talking about the theory proposed based on mouse studies that restricting calories down to near starvation levels made the mice live long because it triggered some biological functions that served to allow adults to survive through periods of poor food supply. People here on Slashdot probably get it but people watching the news this morning stuffing themselves with their third McBacon sandwich now thinks they are just fine.
Stupid Apple fanboy...
Dashing the hopes of legions of skinny Slashdotters who had been keeping themselves in optimal physical condition for the arrival of the Singularity.
I had burgers and beer last night out of sheer anguish and not because that's the kind of crap most of us here would be eating anyway.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm stuffed! No really, I'm so full I feel like rolling off this chair. I just had half a pizza and half a bottle of coke, and I'm not entirely sure I won't finish at least one of those two when this settles down!
And with that said, I've lost about 160lbs over the last year and a half. I eat pizza, noddles, burgers, I have ice cream, candy... I eat chips, dip, sauces... Oh man, do I ever... So how did I lose that weight?
I stopped eating so god damn much.
That's it. No exercise, no mysticism, no fad diets. I don't pay particular attention to what food is healthy and what isn't, I just look at how many calories it is, and I eat less of it than I expend in a day. This pizza feast? Oh man, at a guesstimate I binged a good 2000 calories tonight, that's more than I usually eat in an entire day! And that's okay, because I don't do this every day. Tomorrow I won't even feel like eating much for the first half of the day, I'll probably end up eating a pear or two for breakfast just to wake up the system, and then lunch will be something light again. All in all it's not the day that counts, but the average over time.
So yeah, from one former fatass to all the fatasses out there... keep fooling yourself if you want, keep telling yourself that you don't want to lose weight because you'll have to stop eating tasty shit... it's not true, not even remotely. You are using it as an excuse and you know it. It just means you'll have to stop eating twice as much as you need. And no, you won't be constantly hungry if you eat less, people aren't built to eat the amounts you do, it's just your body that has gotten used to it. Once you've stopped that in it's tracks, the body quickly adjusts, and you'll once more only be hungry before meals and so on.
There's no magic. You can keep eating whatever the fuck you want. Just a lot less of it. If you want to eat a LOT, then sure, salad is the way to go... but if you want to eat deliciously greasy... some moderation is key. And it's not harder than that. It's not even much of an effort. No need to go on a diet, no need to even decide to lose weight... just decide to eat less. That's it. Eat less. Weight will fall off, at an unbelievable rate, and you'll still be eating your pizza and chugging that coke... just not for every meal any more.
Restricted caloric intake only makes it *feel* like forever.
Wrong. You body DOES make vitamin D when you are exposed to the sun.
I remember when the mice study came out. "Mice live 50% longer! You might live to 150!" and the guy, bald IIRC, started himself on a lo-cal diet.
Mice lived 3 years instead of 2. Did it greatly extend their lives, or did it just add a year?
This is my hypothesis on the findings: Short-lived animals, like nematodes and lab mice, tend to produce lots of free radicals as they metabolize calories. Long-lived animals tend to have metabolisms that release far fewer free radicals. Free radicals damage DNA and promote cancer. Most lab mice are bred for a high propensity towards developing cancer because that makes them better test subjects for testing anti-cancer drugs and for finding cancer causing agents. I have been told by friends in the biological sciences that all lab rodents, who don't otherwise meet an untimely end, will die of cancer. So, it makes sense that by cutting a lab mouse's calories dramatically you would also dramatically reduce the level of free radicals in its system and, consequently, how quickly it develops terminal cancer. Higher primates, who are much better at controlling free-radical production, seem unlikely to see the same positive results from a calorie-restricting diet.
I can see there being benefits for human health, but the +50% lifespan projections always seemed ridiculous to me. The other question science has yet to answer here is how much calorie reduction is too much? Presumably, there is a range of caloric intake where you wouldn't exactly be starving, but your body would not have enough calories to function correctly, and that would likely have a negative effect on lifespan and long-term health. I'm not going to jump on the extreme low-calorie diet bandwagon until we know better where the right balance lies.
Way to get him on a technicality. So should I keep going and try to twist it back around and say that Vitamin D is not a vitamin in the strict sense of the word? Vitamin D
"An organic chemical compound (or related set of compounds) is called a vitamin when it cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by an organism, and must be obtained from the diet" source. Trivia bit, the word vitamin comes from vital amines (amines being a class of organic molecules).
smoked more pipes than popeye,
Wow, you might want to watch how you are stating the facts about your grandfather. I'm getting a very different picture of him than I think you intended....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
you're worried about nitirites and nitrates in your diet? celery has a lot of nitrites and nitrates. so does spinach. so does lettuce
fruit juice has formaldehyde
chocolate has theobromine
peanuts have aflatoxin, a potent carcinogen
parsley has plyacetylenes
do you want a couple hundred more scary chemicals in your food listed from plant sources?
guess what: the plants ARE TRYING TO KILL YOU. the absolute worst chemicals for you in your diet ARE NATURAL, FROM PLANTS
have been since dinosaurs began munching on them. so herbivores and omnivores like us respond with an organ called "the liver". which breaks down the toxic, carcinogenic, teratogenic, and otherwise lethal brew of noxious chemicals that plants have firing at us for millions of years. it's chemical warfare, us versus them, an arms race
do you know what morning sickness is? do you know why newly pregnant women vomit at the scent or sight or taste of plants?
because evolution has taught women's bodies to stick with THE SAFE MEAT FOOD SOURCES to avoid the noxious alkaloids in plants that will mutate her fetus at the sensitive stage of early pregnancy
just because you can string together a bunch of chemicals doesn't mean you understand what the greatest toxic danger to your body is that is out there: PLANTS
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The primary failed premise of our dietary system is the 2000 calorie diet. Thats fine if you're working with your hands, on your feet. Its too much for the vast majority of people who walk 5000 steps a day and sit on their arse all afternoon. Well that and the idea of shoving pound after pound of sugar, starches and processed foods that are very high in calories into our faces.
I think its hilarious that people look at a happy meal and think the burger is the bad actor. Hint: its the giant fries and soft drink you could start an outboard motor in.
I kicked out the crap junky foods, eat only whole foods that I can recognize in closer to 1500 calorie doses, and lost 70 lbs. I feel and look great. Its pretty easy to stay well within 1500 calories if you just drink water and nothing else...most people take in 500-800+ calories a day in drinks alone.
My typical meals are an egg, bacon and blueberries for breakfast, a salad, yogurt and some citrus for lunch, and a double cheeseburger with a salad I squeeze some limes over for dinner. Yes, thats under 1500 calories...
I agree. I ate vegetarian for a few years in the presumption it'd be healthier, but it wasn't. I had trouble losing weight, and frankly wasn't quite as healthy as I am now. Protein intake was a problem unless I ate soy, and I'm not a fan.
What worked for me was just eating reasonable amounts of good food, and all kinds of it. Quit the worthless oils like canola and safflower and get back to coconut oil, palm oil, butter and lard. Quit the sugar, starches and processed foods. Go for high nutrition instead of high energy.
And do it the Guy Fieri way. Look at it, exclaim how wonderful it smells, then eat one or two bites and move on to the next scene.
So the unanswered question is... what's killing off the low-calorie monkeys at a higher rate than the control monkeys? e.g. If they're succumbing to fractured bones and injuries complicated by poor diet, then the opposite of what you say is true. You'd be more likely to end up decrepit in a nursing home sooner due to a low-calorie diet.
Ditching so-called "wheat" would be first, followed by all simple sugars (starting with fructose, other than what's naturally in any raw fruits).
The monkeys in this study (NIA) are on a diet that includes whole grains and whole corn, but only 4% total calories from sucrose. They are breaking world records for longevity in rhesus monkeys.
Vegan for ten years, and all sorts of animals still smell tasty to me. I don't think it'll ever go away. Even my own blood tastes pretty good. I wish I could not like the smell of animals, but whatever, it doesn't matter. I have strong willpower.
What do you do with the rest of it after you take two bites?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap -- as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation -- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits -- and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure -- thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So what?
1. ascorbic acid in vegetables tends to scavenge nitrites, so you don't end up with nitrosamines.
2. Vegetables have a very low amine content, so again you don't end up with nitrosamines.
3. Meats preserved with nitrates (especially the ones subsequently cooked at hi temp - that's when many nitrosamines are formed ) are the ones associated with cancer, etc. Vegetables aren't. I just named the two nitrosamines most prevalent in cooked bacon.
The elevated risk is associated with eating meats cured with nitrates/nitrites. There's no elevated risk associated with vegetables that contain nitrates.
Do look at the phrase "sufficient quantities" Do the vitamins your body makes but needs supplements of not qualify since your body made them?
The elevated risk is associated with eating meats cured with nitrates/nitrites. There's no elevated risk associated with vegetables that contain nitrates.
Shouldn't that mean that the association between nitrates and these health risks is not causational? I mean, if it's nitrates then it's nitrates, right? I know that diets high in nitrates are also highly correlated with other "unhealthy" habits like lack of exercise, smoking, etc.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
As a matter of fact, I'm both. I have a Ph.D. in animal nutrition. That makes me both an animal scientist AND a nutritionist.
And to answer your second question "Yes" they do have similar needs. Nutrients are nutrients. The goal in designing a diet for an adult human and a growing animal are different, but the concepts are the same. Where do you think most of our knowledge about nutrition comes from? Research trials in animals.
I can surgically implant a valve into the small intestine of a pig to take samples while investigating amino acid absorption, but human nutrition researchers have an understandably more difficult time trying to get approval from their review board than I do. Therefore, most nutrient transport work is done with livestock and mice.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
In my Animal Nutrition classes I make it clear that Vitamin C is NOT considered a vitamin in most livestock because only a handful of species lack the capacity to synthesize it. I still get it as an answer on tests though.
Ravenshrike is correct though, the key to that quote is "sufficient quantities". The definition I use in class is as follows:
1. an organic compound of natural food, but distinct from carbohydrate, protein and fat
2. is present in foods in minute amounts
3. is essential for development of normal tissue, as well as for health growth and maintenance.
4. When absent or deficient from the diet, or not properly absorbed/utilized results in a specific deficiency disease or syndrome.
5. Cannot be synthesized in sufficient quantities by the animal and must be obtained from the diet.
That's a pretty long definition, but that's because vitamins, unlike most other nutrient classifications are not grouped because of similar structure or function, but simply for convenience.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
The title should be "We have a 50% confidence that Caloric restriction extends life"
"Calorie Restriction May No* Extend Lifespan", "works in primates suggests that". FFS! That is politician speak.
Shouldn't that mean that the association between nitrates and these health risks is not causational? I mean, if it's nitrates then it's nitrates, right? I know that diets high in nitrates are also highly correlated with other "unhealthy" habits like lack of exercise, smoking, etc.
Actually no, it's not nitrates, its nitrosamines. Nitrates can be reduced to nitrites. Nitrites can react with amines (amino acids and their degradation products, lots of those in meat, not so much in veg) at high temperature (cooking) to form nitrosamines. You're right though they have to control for lots of other factors, usually by doing case control studies.
What do you do with the rest of it after you take two bites?
I have three kids, four dogs, two cats and a wife. I whip up a pile of tasty food, eat some, and its then descended upon by a phalanx of small protein disposal units that all run around for 10 hours a day, so they can enjoy a few more calories than I do.
I'm also known for buying a nice burger and side salad at a restaurant, eating the salad and taking two bites out of the burger, and then carting the burger home and making two more meals out of it.
Its mostly a lot of grazing, and if you ever watch the competition cooking shows where they have to make a 'one bite" meal on a spoon...I do a lot of that too.