Calorie Restriction Society Seeks Longevity and Health
Beyond mere weight loss and wellness, life extension is a powerful motivation to do what is difficult; restrict one’s daily calorie intake.
Calorie restriction research goes back more than 70 years to pioneering experiments on mice at Cornell University. Restricting your food intake does appear to extend life, although no one’s totally sure how.
“If we base ideas on calorie restriction, in animals, and even in monkeys, which are relatively close to us, we see that calorie restriction slows down virtually all diseases of aging,” researcher on aging at Harvard David Sinclair said.
Eat less, live longer? Easier said than done.
Brian Delaney is the president of the Calorie Restriction Society. He says it’s easy to live on a calorie restricted diet, simply figure out what your normal intake of calories would be and then reduce it by 20 to 30 percent – or maybe even a bit more.
“But then you don’t want to take it too far because then it’s frankly starvation,” he said.
Members of Delaney’s group generally consume fewer than 2,000 calories a day and some go as low as 1,000 calories. Will they live longer? Is what’s good for dessert-deprived monkeys also good for people?
“The CR diet could allow a human being to live to be maybe 135 or 140 years, but we don’t know yet because we have not done that long a study in humans,” Delaney said.
The article continues.