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Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

nature.com

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

#41
post #7

Am I the only one who finds this caloric restriction stuff depressing? If starving for 50 years will increase my life I don't even want to know about it. Stupid science. Next they're going to tell us that a combination of caloric restriction & celibacy will do even more.

On the other hand age related diseases like diabetes have some pretty unpleasant symptoms, if you could avoid them just by adjusting your diet in later years it's worth knowing about.

Re: Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

#42
post #7

Am I the only one who finds this caloric restriction stuff depressing? If starving for 50 years will increase my life I don't even want to know about it. Stupid science. Next they're going to tell us that a combination of caloric restriction & celibacy will do even more.

Intermittent fasting is the smart way to restrict calories whilst still enjoying food.

Bah!

I'm not sure what bothers me more the slight chance that CR is real enough that I will need to do it or how excited and evangelical people get about their puritanical eating cults.

Intermittent fasting! Just the sound of it is evil.

Re: Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

#43
What's interesting about human all-cause mortality trends is that human beings in the developed countries have been gaining three months of lifespan for every year that they live (sometimes described as "six hours each day").[1] Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[2] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. A lot incremental improvements in both public health and in medical practice, as well as much better nutrition than in the old days, are steadily increasing life expectancy.[3] This is happening for people of all ages; life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising, and all-cause mortality and morbidity declining, throughout the developed countries of the world.[4]

So the monkey research needs to be meshed in with human research that shows that mildly "overweight" (if fit) human beings have better mortality outcomes than human beings of normal weight[5] to tease out what the causation is for health outcomes of different patterns of nutrition. The example of Rimonabant[6] shows that sometimes an animal model doesn't adequately predict treatment effects in human subjects.

[1] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

[2] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

[4] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23280227

[6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19578688

Re: Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

#44

> Received 12 October 2013 Accepted 05 March 2014 Published 01 April 2014 Am I the only one who finds this crazy? It takes 6 months from submission date till publication! The peer review process should move faster and become modernized. I undrestand, you want to be published on prestigious journals, but Nature and others can modernize to publish more. You can argue, we lost 6 months or half a year of progress because…

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Re: Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

#47

People are mentioning caloric restriction not being worth it for humans because of quality of life vs length of life. However one thought that I find interesting, is that for our generation, living just two or three extra years could potentially make a huge difference. If you subscribe to the idea of a coming technological singularity, or even to the idea that we're a few decades away from SENS escape velocity, you'd…

See comments above, the original research is flawed. New research shows that moderate caloric restriction has no statistically significant effect over eating a healthy diet within your caloric needs. It is overeating which decreases your life span.

Re: Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

#49

Caloric restriction is absolutely fascinating in all forms. I think intermittent fasting might be the best-known variant of this, but there are others. All of them cause dramatic changes in the way bodies function, from changing the hormones secreted to changing the form of fuel it uses to run itself (e.g. ketones in low-carb diets instead of glucose). Caloric restriction has a whole bunch of knock-on effects, any on…

>For example, restricting calories means that you're restricting protein. Most people think of protein as a good thing, but that's what stimulates the hormone IGF-1 to be secreted, which is necessary for growth of all kinds--muscle growth (which is why bodybuilders eat as much protein as possible), but also including cancer.

While people on CR do seem to try and keep IGF-1 on the lower side, there's no consensus on protein yet. Most seem to eat a normal proportion, (though still less than average person since their overall intake it lower.).

I have seen some people doing CR specially avoid whey protein because it's known to particularly raise IGF-1 (which is why on the other hand people trying to maximize size of muscles like it)

Re: Caloric restriction reduces age-related and all-cause mortality in rhesus monkeys

#50
'cause who really likes _eating_, anyway. A no-brainer to just reduce food. Yeah that'll work.

Lots of things might reduce mortality and prolong lifespan. It's quite another thing to ask whether these things are viable options for modern human beings.

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