
Calorie restrictive eating for longer life? The story we didn’t hear in the news - soundsop
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/07/calorie-restrictive-eating-for-longer.html
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JulianMorrison
I've heard a talk recently by a guy who works with scientists who do calorie
restriction experiments.

What he said is an eye-opener. The animals look healthier but they don't live
longer. They don't seem to die of age, but they do just drop dead one day, not
always from any obvious cause at all - although they seem particularly
susceptible to infections.

His hypothesis was that calorie restriction works by forcing the body on such
low resources it has to cannibalize itself, which has the advantage it cleans
up age-related crud much more effectively - and the disadvantage that there is
absolutely no slack in the system. Every problem is a crisis.

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eru
Slack and crud?

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JulianMorrison
I'm paraphrasing because I'm not a scientist.

Slack = various sorts of resources, including immune resources.

Crud = inter- and intra-cellular unwanted buildup of proteins, failing cells,
non-reversible damage, yadda yadda. It all gets torn up and coincidentally
cleaned up by the body's panic for materiel.

~~~
randallsquared
If that's the case, intermittent fasting seems like it should produce similar
effects to CR. I wait with bated breath for the experiment that does
intermittent CR on mice. :)

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sunburnt
The article in Science concludes with this:

"Weindruch and his collaborators plan to continue monitoring the remaining
monkeys, which could stretch the study's length past 3 decades. "If we reach
the 40-year-old life span, the study could continue for another 15 years,"
Weindruch said."

The NY Times article says:

“Ultimately the results seem pretty inconclusive at this point,” Dr. Austad
said. “I don’t know why they didn’t wait longer to publish.”

So, I think it is too early to draw any conclusions about longevity. Though,
it does seem prudent to note the reduced rate of diabetes, cancer, and
heart/brain disease in monkeys with reduced caloric intake.

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ellyagg
I don't see how prudent it is. What can I do with that information, given the
rest of the results of the study?

I don't have anything against diabetes, cancer or heart/brain disease per se.
It's not as if, when I die from an infection or pneumonia, I'll congratulate
myself that it wasn't cancer!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, if you consider it "prudent to note
the reduced rate of diabetes, cancer, and heart/brain disease", then my
response is it's just _precisely_ as prudent to note the increase in non-
diabetes, cancer, and heart/brain disease related deaths.

~~~
Periodic
It's that all-cause mortality factor.

Sure, it may be reducing the causes of some diseases, but if it isn't
improving the overall life span of the monkeys or their quality of life it has
very limited application.

Perhaps it will turn out that those with a restricted diet who make it through
the first 30 years make it through the next 40 as long as they don't fall and
break their osteoperotic bones or get exposed to a disease.

As it currently stands, the study is showing no difference. Sitting around for
another 25 years on the hope that the trend might change sounds a bit like
unfounded faith to me.

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JacobAldridge
Basically, rhesus monkeys on a restricted calorie diet only lived longer _if
you remove "non-aging related deaths"_.

But some of those deaths (eg, dying under anesthesia during a blood test)
could have links to their diet, so removing them is just withdrawing non-
supporting evidence to prove your (pharma-funded) hypothesis.

In other news, riding your bike to work is considered safer than driving a car
... once we remove those cases of bike-riders killed in car collisions.

~~~
Confusion
_could have links to their diet_

Replace that with _could have been caused by aliens_ to see how ridiculous
that sort of claim is. There is no reason to suppose that dying under
anesthesia is related to the diet.

Also your analogy doesn't make any sense. Perhaps if they removed bikers that
died in traffic accidents _while not riding a bike_. And then you could argue
'bikers behave differently in traffic, so perhaps biking was the cause'...
yeah, and perhaps we should also take the phase of the moon into account, just
to be sure...

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three14
I haven't read the studies. Still, why isn't it reasonable to think that a
monkey that eats too little will die more readily under stress? You can remove
clearly unrelated causes (e.g. monkeys run over by bicyclists), but it's not
nearly so clear for anesthesia.

~~~
Confusion
Because the monkeys weren't being underfed and it's a straw man to suggest
they were. Tibetan monks get by on much less food than we do and they will
still kick our asses anytime.

~~~
three14
You're assuming that a monkey that eats 20% less than a monkey that's given
the choice to eat as much as it wants _necessarily_ isn't underfed? Maybe. But
without some other research that I've missed, that really begs the question.

I think anyone living in a western country has enough data to realize that
people eating a western diet tend to be overfed, so the comparison between
westerners and Tibetan monks has little to do with monkeys.

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geuis
I take issue with much of what was said in this article. Many, if not all of
the examples the author refers to are explicit in there statements and not
being vague. Additionally, the results of the studies are available for review
and carefully explain the reasons why some deaths were not inluded in the
results.

The author is picking apart chosen pieces of text and apparently has not read
the actual study results.

~~~
davi
Agreed. I stopped reading when the author got into a snit because "Control
animals were fed 20% more than their average daily intake". It seems clear
from context that that was to allow the animals to eat as much as they wanted,
the animals were not force-fed 20% more. They're given extra food in case they
feel extra hungry that day. It's standard in caloric restriction experiments
to feed one group of animals ad libitum, and the other group, some fraction of
the ad libitum rate. The effect of caloric restriction on life span has been
known for decades, well before it penetrated the mainstream consciousness, and
has been described for many different species under many different
experimental regimes. It's a robust effect, and a mysterious one.

This article smacks of 9/11 truther, anti-evolution froth. The author has an
agenda and she'll pound on her podium until she bludgeons us into agreement
that all science infrastructure is corrupt and nothing we read could possibly
be true.

Admittedly, there's a lot of junk science out there, and the authors of this
study could have waited another 10 years before reporting any results. But put
yourself in their shoes: you're starting to see an effect. Every time you go
to a conference, people say, "So, how's that multidecade experiment of yours
going?" So why not report what you see, and publish another paper in 10 years?
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. Really.

~~~
robg
The problem is that in ten years there will still be many unanswered
questions. Science is a series of progress reports. They chose to publish and
their peers agreed that the work was publishable.

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10ren
There was a recent study online, about how moderately overweight people have a
slightly lower mortality rate than those with "normal" weight. The problems
are with the morbidly obese end of the spectrum.

I can't find the study (anyone recall it?), but it seems compatible with the
implication of this submission, that while being overweight might increase
"age-related" deaths, it protects you against the others.

~~~
tokenadult
Here is a Hacker News thread about the finding you mention:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=675671>

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edw519
One of the few negative things about the growth of the internet is how much
people rely on it for health information. Sometimes I think they'd be better
off flipping a coin.

~~~
eru
You can get a lot of flaky diet fads from women's magazines, too.

~~~
buckwild
I don't know if its just me who's noticed this, but if one pans out and takes
an overview of the main diet fads over the past 30 years, one will notice that
the main focus of a diet changes every 10 years or so.

Recall in the 90's when everything was "low-fat". Starting somewhere in the
2000's the health industry switched it over to "low-carbs".

In the 80's, if one wanted to build muscle they were told to eat as many carbs
as possible. Nowadays one is supposed to eat as much protein as possible.

This is just diet information. Methods of exercise change too. In fact, they
sort of cycle in a way.

Ever feel like the health industry is trying to pull one over on you?

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sailormoon
I do not know what I am talking about when it comes to this topic. Neither, it
seems, do most others here. We are intelligent laymen, but laymen all the
same. So what do we do in order to intelligently judge this blog post?

Well, first, let's consider what we know about the contenders. On one side, a
number of respected professional scientists conducting a very expensive multi-
decade study and publishing the results in peer-reviewed journals. On the
other side, a nurse with a Blogspot blog.

OK, that is not necessarily bad. Great truths have been spoken by nobodies. We
judge by the message, not the speaker.

But still, we need more "meta" information. Studies appearing in peer reviewed
journals are assumed to be reliable because of the good history of the
journal. Let's try to ascertain the reliability of this source, looking at her
history - and maybe we'll find some other things she discusses that we do know
something about, so we can match up her worldview to ours.

And ... oh dear. Let's look at this blog, shall we? I'll ignore the warning
sign of the 20+ links to "fat support" groups in the blogroll. Maybe she's
just supportive of her large readers. Maybe she doesn't have an agenda?
Benefit of the doubt and all that.

Oh, another long (LONG) article in which she completely demolishes another
study, this time about the "obesity paradox" - being slightly overweight was
associated with a slight increase in health. She claims that in fact the study
shows that overweight and obese people are much healthier than the media
reported, and they were covering it up.

Hm. She takes two major studies to pieces in as many posts. That's unusual,
for not one but TWO studies to be completely wrong, in a short amount of time,
and one person - her - to be the one to find where they are wrong. And both
wrong, as it happens, in favour of eating.

Are you getting suspicious yet?

Let's move further down the _first page_ of her blog. Ooh, a post in which she
cherry picks a couple of bad examples of govt. health care to make an unsubtle
point about the planned health reforms in America. Completely ignores that
every other developed country has socialised health care and we do fine - plus
live longer (which we shouldn't, since fat people have an advantage,
apparently!).

I am beginning to smell a crank.

I make it down to "Pudge Police are coming (Part 2)" before calling it quits.

Still treating this article as something worth your time?

~~~
jongraehl
I was entertained by your fact-finding mission. I only skimmed the original
diatribe.

Still, the fact that deaths were removed from the data at all (exactly in
favor of the pet hypothesis of the researchers) because they "didn't count" is
extremely suspicious, even if it may prove justified (by other confirming
studies).

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fingergunslngr
This is pure speculative thought, but I feel the crux of the problem may be in
the tests to determine the caloric load of foods/drinks - they literally just
set it on fire, with the fundamental reason being, this is more or less how
our body draws energy from what we consume. I could be wrong, but I feel as
though my insides constitute something much more intricate and complicated
than a furnace. As I see it, the problem lies in our methods of determining
the respective energy potential/composition of a given food - the problem may
be with the standard of measure, not a method of dietary restriction.

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tdziuba
I don't know where OP lives, but I heard it in the news.

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mvbma
Summary: junk science reported by junk press.

~~~
robg
You really think a blog post is enough to justify this conclusion?

Here, read the journal article: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/17316946/Caloric-
Restriction-Delay...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/17316946/Caloric-Restriction-
Delays-Disease-Onset-and-Mortality-in-Rhesus-Monkeys)

Please tell me how it's junk science.

~~~
ellyagg
Are you serious? How about this part right here in the study title:

Caloric Restriction DELAYS Disease Onset AND MORTALITY in Rhesus Monkeys

...combined with the fact that in the contents of the study you link to, they
eliminate significant data points whose presence would contradict the claimed
delay in mortality.

I guess we'll all have to judge for ourselves whether it's fair to eliminate a
bunch of deaths other than for exceedingly obvious reasons, e.g., someone
breaks into the lab and kills the monkeys. I know which side I'm on.

