Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Will starving yourself help you live longer? Maybe not


The longevity diet's premise is seductively simple: cutting your calorie intake well below your usual diet will add years to your life.
New research published on Wednesday, however, shows the extreme, emaciating diet doesn't increase lifespan in rhesus monkeys, the closest human relatives to try it in a rigorous, long-running study. While caveats remain, outside experts regarded the findings as definitive, particularly when combined with those from a similar study.
"If there's a way to manipulate the human diet to let us live longer, we haven't figured it out yet and it may not exist," said biologist Steven Austad of the University of Texas Health Science Center's Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, who wrote an analysis of the study in Nature.
Since 1934, research has shown that lab rats, mice, yeast, fruit flies and round worms fed 10 percent to 40 percent fewer calories than their free-eating peers lived some 30 percent longer. In some studies, they lived twice as long.
Such findings have spawned a growing community of believers who seek better health and longer life in calorie-restricted (CR)diets, as promised in the 2005 book "The Longevity Diet," including 5,000 members of the CR Society International. The research has also prompted companies like Procter & Gamble and Nu Skin Enterprises to develop drugs to mimic the effects of calorie restriction.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/29/us-usa-health-longevity-idUSBRE87S0WW20120829

1 comment:

Sarah3ahary said...

I'm concerned that starving won't help live longer. And I'm sure that following these rules (drink a lot of water every day, eat healthy organic food, avoid fast-food, sleep well and do exercises 2-3 times a week) will help to stay healthy. I use a service, Fat Loss Factor program, that contains a lot of informative articles, weight watchers diets resume, tips and more.