The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less

Absolutely, yes.

Although gaining muscle is much healthier than gaining adipose tissue, the implication of the article (and an abundance of empirical evidence) is that eating itself is a stressful process. Eating is the vector through which you expose yourself to oxidative stresses and pathogens. Eating less but still meeting your caloric needs would mean minimizing exposure to these risk factors.

Even if it means dying a year earlier I'm going to eat salted butter and drink red wine and enjoy it. Better to enjoy less than to have more you don't enjoy?

I recall watching a video of an engineer practicing CR. He looked miserable and older than his years. He was constantly cold and had chronic sore feet because the soles of his feet were too thin.

When I don't eat enough, I don't get hungry, and I don't loose much weight, but I do have trouble sleeping which results in daytime fatigue and depression. For me the happiness/sleep threshold is sharp, so I eat just above that threshold.

Some references for those who want to dig in.

Will calorie restriction work in humans? http://dx.doi.org/10.18632/aging.100581

Caloric restriction improves health and survival of rhesus monkeys https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14063

In general, the consensus in the research community is that we shouldn't expect more than an additional ~5 years from the life-long practice of calorie restriction. The evolutionary argument is that the calorie restriction response evolved very early on in as a way to enhance fitness given seasonal famines. A season is a long time for a mouse, not so long for a human, so only the mouse evolves a very plastic lifespan. The practical argument is that 5-10 years is about the largest effect that could exist and still be hard to pull out from existing demographic data of restricted calorie intake in a bulletproof, rigorous way. Obviously any much larger effect would have been discovered in antiquity and be very well known and characterized by now.

So that said about longevity, it is very clear that calorie restriction does better and more reliable things for health in ordinary humans in the short term of months and mid-term of few years than any presently available enhancement technology can replicate.

A good deal of research into aging is focused on trying to recreate the calorie restriction response. So far this has consumed billions with little of practical use to show for it beyond increased knowledge of some thin slices of cellular biochemistry relating to nutrient sensing and energy metabolism. It has proven to be very hard and very expensive to get anywhere here.

So calorie restriction itself is free and reliable in its effects. Everyone should give it a try. There are, however, far more important areas of aging research to direct funding to instead of trying to recreate this effect with pharmaceuticals. In an age in which meaningful rejuvenation is possible to create in the years ahead (see, for example, clearance of senescent cells, something that calorie restriction can only slightly achieve in a very tiny way, while drug candidates are managing 25-50% clearance) it seems just plain dumb to instead be chasing expensive, hard ways to only slightly slow down aging.

Assume that you had a garden with acres of produce all perfectly grown and in season. If you wanted orange juice all you would need to do is walk out into this garden, pick some oranges, bring them back to the kitchen and manually squeeze them into a glass.

Now imagine if you wanted to have a bit of toast, maybe with some chocolate-hazelnut spread. All you would need to do is walk into the garden, grab some hazelnuts off the tree and some cocoa beans, perhaps with some cane sugar for good measure. Some blender in the kitchen would be able to make your hazelnut spread, just so long as you shelled the nuts first. Similarly with the bread, in this garden, free for the taking would be some strong wheat that you can put through some kitchen appliance, then after a few hours with the breadmaking machine the bread would be good to eat. Butter would be equally simple too, you just needed to milk a cow, put the milk in some glorified washing machine with a bit of salt, then wait a while to get the freshest butter ever tasted.

Would you be able to complete all of these tasks by breakfast? Would you really bother to shell all of those hazelnuts? Would you question why it is that you have juiced 14 oranges when actually just the one orange, non-juiced was satisfying enough and didn't require all that effort dicking about with juicing?

Of course people have allotments and smallholdings so this does happen, albeit with greenhouses instead of some magic 'always in season' aspect. But my office workmates of the obese variety have no idea of the effort needed to get their food, even if it is healthy food. The connection is not there.

One of my dream is to rock up at the doctors one day having eaten too much fruit and veg. For the doctor to recommend me to stay off the veggies and eat some sugary snacks instead. I am fairly sure that no amount of fruit and veg would age me, not in the way that sugary snacks, beef products and everything processed would.