Eating fewer calories each day for a long time may affect your future, some studies suggest. Lifestyle communities, like Bizzo Casino USA, usually focus on fun and games. Users chat about health tips while playing. Now, they’re also interested in calorie restriction research.
Imagine a near-future dinner date: a man and a woman meeting for the first time, the early awkwardness fading as the evening starts smoothly.
So, what do we need to do to enhance the length and quality of our lives even more? Researchers everywhere are exploring new ideas. For Mattison and his team, the solution is a simple diet change. They think a better old age might come from eating less food. This idea is known as “calorie restriction.” This diet is more than eating fewer fatty foods now and then. It’s about permanently and gradually shrinking part sizes. A 30% cut in daily food since the early 1930s links to longer, more active lives in worms, flies, rats, mice, and monkeys. In the animal kingdom, calorie restriction is the best remedy for life’s challenges. And humans may have as much to gain.
Cornaro had limited food but a wide variety. He said he enjoyed “perfect health” until he died more than 40 years later. He often changed his birthdate, claiming to be 98. Yet, many believe he was about 84 when he died. That’s still remarkable for the 16th century, when 50 or 60 was seen as old. In 1591, his grandson released a three-volume work titled “Discourses on the Sober Life.” This book made dietary restrictions popular and reshaped the concept of aging.
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Longevity Trials
Cornaro was an interesting man, but no branch of science should take his findings as fact. Even if he kept his word and stayed healthy for nearly fifty years, that seems unlikely.
Since a key study in 1935 with white rats, researchers have linked cutting food intake by 30-50% to a longer lifespan. This restriction helps delay death from age-related issues and diseases. Naturally, results seen in rats and other lab animals don’t always translate directly to humans.
In the late 1980s, two long-term trials began. One took place at NIA and the other at the University of Wisconsin. They aimed to study calorie restriction and aging in Rhesus monkeys. Not only do we share 93% of our DNA with these primates, but we also age in the same way.
Sherman is the oldest Rhesus monkey on record. He’s nearly 20 years older than the average lifespan for his species in captivity.
And they’re easy to control. The diets for the 76 monkeys at the University of Wisconsin and the 121 at NIA are designed for them. They get special biscuits. These diets consider each monkey’s age, weight, and natural appetite. All monkeys get all the nutrients and minerals they need. It’s that half of the monkeys, the calorie-restricted (or CR) group, eat 30% less.
They are far from malnourished or starving. Take Sherman, a 43-year-old monkey from NIA. Mattison notes that Sherman began the CR diet in 1987 at age 16. Since then, he hasn’t displayed any obvious hunger signs typical of his species.
As younger monkeys were developing diseases and dying, he seemed to be immune to aging. Even into his 30s, he would have been considered an old monkey, but he didn’t look or act like one.
The same is true, to varying extents, for the rest of his experimental troop at NIA. “We’re seeing reduced rates of both diabetes and cancer in the calorie-restricted groups,” Mattison explains. The University of Wisconsin’s 2009 study reported nearly identical improvements.
Their CR monkeys looked much younger. They had more hair, less sagging, and brown fur instead of grey. They were also healthier inside, free from disease, compared to monkeys on a standard diet. Cancer cases, like intestinal adenocarcinoma, fell by over half. Heart disease risk dropped by a similar amount. Of the ad libitum monkeys, 11 got diabetes, and five showed pre-diabetic signs. Even so, every calorie-restricted monkey kept stable and healthy blood-sugar control. For them, diabetes wasn’t a thing.
Only 13% of the monkeys in the CR group had died of age-related causes in 20 years. In the ad libitum group, 37% had died, nearly three times as many. A 2014 study by the University of Wisconsin showed that this percentage stayed the same.
“We have demonstrated that ageing can be manipulated in primates,” says Anderson. “It often gets overlooked because it seems obvious. But this idea is very important. It shows that aging is a good target for medical treatment and clinical intervention.”
If ageing can be delayed, in other words, all the diseases associated with it will follow suit. “Focusing on one disease at a time won’t help people live longer, since they’ll die from something else,” says Anderson. If you cured every cancer, it still wouldn’t stop deaths from heart disease, dementia, or diabetes-related disorders. Whereas if you go after ageing, you can offset the lot in one go.”
Final Thoughts
Calorie restriction might not grant immortality. Still, evidence shows it could greatly extend both lifespan and healthspan. While more human research is needed, the idea is clear: eating a little less might help us live a lot better.
