Active Low-Carber Forums - View Single Post - Severely Restricted Diet Linked To Physical Fitness Into Old Age

Quote:

Originally Posted by ReginaW

Actually it's not impossible to reconcile once one includes the concept of "adequate nutrition" to the mix....something those who adhere to CRON practice.....'calorie restricted optimal nutrition' is not an easy practice - it involves weighing and measuring everything to calculate out and target meeting specific nutrient goals each day, and that includes adequate protein to insure adequate amino acids are consumed daily. Since the calorie restriction undoubtedly lowers the overall intake of calories from fat, since those eating CRON eat a lot of vegetables and such to meet vitamins and mineral targets, it's theoretically possible to reach an equilibrium where metabolism slows to lower metabolic rate, sparing muscle and maintaining fat reserves (note - most doing CRON are not overweight, they lose accumulated fat stores). It's the nutrient aspect of calorie restriction that is often overlooked and/or not talked about - and it is critically important for anyone considering calorie restriction as a dietary option to understand and follow! It isn't simply reducing calories - it's reducing calories while optimizing intake of essential nutrients to meet and exceed requirements.

Glucose is poisonous to humans. Glucose is poisonous to the cells that compose us. Cells grow insulin resistant. We could hypothesize that they grow insulin resistant because they want to live and to do so means to avoid poison like glucose.

If the diet we ate contained carbohydrate it would only be natural that restricting it would be beneficial to humans. But not because we thrive on a total caloric restriction. Instead it's because we are not as intoxicated by the lesser amount of glucose it contains. So in effect it's not the total restriction that benefits us but the carbohydrate restriction.

Achieving optimal nutrition with caloric restriction involves complicated and technologically advanced maneuvers that would be impossible during the period of time we evolved i.e. a few million years. Such a method is hardly justifiable from an evolutionary perspective. Because it implies that we would have needed those advanced methods to survive in the first place. Since we didn't have these methods, we didn't survive because of them. If we are here now it's because we used a different method that would have been available to us with little else than a sharp stick and a rock.

It's difficult to show that a sharp stick and a rock can do anything so complex as to allow us to define and measure optimal nutrition. The only alternative is that we are born with this method to know what food we need to eat. In other words, it's part of us genetically and we transmit it to our progeny.

If we are genetically programmed to know how much food we should eat, then there's something, some signal we should recognize. Hunger comes to mind. If hunger is the natural method we have to figure how much food to eat, ignoring hunger is like ignoring our nature. Hunger implies that there's a nutritional deficiency i.e. it's time to fill up on nutrients. Since hunger is a sign of nutritional deficiency and since a nutritional deficiency can't be reconciled with longevity then it's only logical to conclude that restricting calories which invariably result in hunger can't lead to longevity.

We don't live longer by eating less. We live longer by eating less carbohydrate. Zero is best but that's just me and my logic.