Here’s one way that appears more and more likely to increase your life span — eat as few calories as is possible while still maintaining a “healthy” diet. I put healthy in quotes there on purpose, because in many ways health is a subjective criteria and many people might not be willing to give up some of the things that seem to come with this approach.
Calorie restriction’s impact on lifespan was first demonstrated in laboratory mice. Nobody’s quite sure why mice fed low calorie diets live longer, although there is speculation that a calorie restricted diet may better reflect what mice in the wild typically eat (i.e., laboratory mice may, in general, be overfed compared to their wild cousins much like the average Westerner eats far more calories than their ancestors did just a few hundred years ago).
Studies of calorie restriction in primates is starting to be published suggesting that the process also works in monkeys. Monkeys fed diets with 30 percent fewer calories both live significantly longer and develop fewer diseases than do monkeys fed “normal” diets.
A small number of human beings have adopted low calorie diets based on these results, and low calorie doesn’t have to mean feeling hungry all the time, especially if you adopt a diet involving a lot of vegetables. CBS News talked to a man who claims to eat 6 pounds of vegetables a day to supplement small quantities of animal protein such as fish.
But there are side effects to such a diet. In mice, for example, the animals on calorie restricted diet have levels of chemicals associated with stress that are through the roof. The man who told CBS News of his veggie eating ways, also admits that such a diet will result in brittle bones and a decline in libido.
At which point, frankly, the value of such a method for life extension really loses almost all of its attraction to my mind, especially given that biological health is only one of many factors that will determine how long an individual will live. The real value of these calorie restriction studies in animals is to get a better handle on aging so that medical science can move closer to developing effective anti-aging therapies. Except for a few brave souls, calorie restriction as a life extension strategy is really a non-starter.
Source:
Key to long life: near-starvation diet?. CBS News, July 8, 2002.