How Cutting Calories May Increase Longevity

Articles like this piss me off.  While on the cover, this looks like a positive article on WebMD about how practicing CR may increase lifespan, it goes into detail about a "study" done by John Phelan, PhD of UCLA.  Their bottom line: Severely cutting calories might extend human life a little bit, but not much, and the sacrifice likely wouldn't be worth it. The report appears in Ageing Research Reviews.

"rats in longevity studies got so few calories that they could no longer reproduce. The rats simply didn't have enough energy to breed and rear the next generation.

That saved the rats a lot of effort. Without the wear and tear of parenting, their bodies got a break, and they lived longer.

But people are different. They don't give birth to litters of babies per pregnancy or reproduce as often as rats.

So even if someone starved themselves enough to shut down fertility -- and stayed that way throughout adulthood -- they wouldn't live much longer than their well-fed peers, Phelan's team reasoned."

Yes, that's sound reasoning if I've ever heard it.  Let's just study one of the things that are different between rats and people, the fact that rats breed much more often, and focus on that in our study and toss out all of the known benefits of CR.  Oh, and while we're at it let's also forget that CR has been studied in other higher simians, and been shown to increase their lifespan by up to 30%.

On the positive note, the article did discuss that some progress is being made in determining what about caloric restricting is causing the benefit.  Hopefully we will be able to come up with a mimetic soon, so we don't have to practice CR in order to live longer.