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The eternal question of calorie restriction

There’s a lot of buzz about a new paper in Nature (yes, I know there’s always buzz about some Nature paper or other), Impact of caloric restriction on health and survival in rhesus monkeys from the NIA study. You’ve probably heard about calorie restriction before. For me the issue I have with it is that people who are very knowledgeable (i.e., researchers who know a great deal abut human physiology, etc.) have given me contradictory assessments of this strategy of life extension. But it’s not totally crazy, there are serious scientists at top-tier universities who practice calorie restriction themselves. This isn’t the final word, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is going to take decades for it to resolve itself for humans specifically (because some people will always be, and perhaps rightly, extrapolating from short-lived organisms to humans when it comes to modulations of lifespan in the laboratory).  The New York Times piece had a really strange coda:

Dr. de Cabo, who says he is overweight, advised people that if they want to try a reduced-calorie diet, they should consult a doctor first. If they can handle such a diet, he said, he believes they would be healthier, but, he said, he does not know if they would live longer.

Some scientists still have faith in the low-calorie diets. Richard Weindruch, a director of the Wisconsin study, said he was “a hopeless caloric-restriction romantic,” but added that he was not very good at restricting his own calories. He said he might start trying harder, though: “I’m only 62. It isn’t too late.”

Then there is Mark Mattson, chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging, who was not part of the monkey study. He believes there is merit to caloric restriction. It can help the brain, he said, as well as make people healthier and probably make them live longer.

Dr. Mattson, who is 5-foot-9 and weighs 130 pounds, skips breakfast and lunch on weekdays and skips breakfast on weekends.

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