A very low calorie diet can help the heart age more slowly, according to researchers who released what they call the first-ever human study on the subject.

The result: Those limiting caloric intake had the heart functions of much younger people — typically about 15 years younger than their age. Ultrasound exams showed group members had hearts that appeared more elastic than most people their age; their hearts were also able to relax between beats in a way similar to hearts in younger people.

"This is the first study to demonstrate that long-term calorie restriction with optimal nutrition has cardiac-specific effects that (delay or reverse) age-associated declines in heart function," said Luigi Fontana, lead author and assistant professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.

Fontana said simply consuming less food is not the answer. Members of the study group eat food resembling a traditional Mediterranean diet, focusing on vegetables, olive oil, beans, whole grains, fish and fruit. They avoid refined and processed foods, soft drinks, desserts, white bread and other sources of "empty" calories.

Research on mice and rats indicated that life span can be stretched by about 30 percent with stringent and consistent caloric restriction. That research also suggested that restricting calories can help prevent cancer.

Heart attacks and strokes cause about 40 percent of deaths in Western countries, researchers said. Cancer causes another 30 percent. Fontana said those deaths are attributable to "secondary aging" from high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure and other often-preventable conditions.

While it has long been known that a healthy diet and exercise can reduce risks, the study suggests that caloric restriction combined with optimal nutrition can do even more.

Fontana said most participants in the study had immediate relatives who suffered heart attacks or strokes, so it was unlikely their genetic makeup was a contributing factor to their unusually healthy hearts.

"We don't know how long each individual will end up living, but they certainly have a longer life expectancy than average because they're most likely not going to die from a heart attack, stroke or diabetes," said professor John O. Holloszy, who worked on the study. "And if, in fact, their hearts are aging more slowly, it's conceivable they'll live for a very long time."

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It sounds like the reduced number of calories may not be the cause of the better cardiac performance.

Scientists attempt to understand the triggers, timing, and molecular basis for aging as they try to stave off humanity's most intractable scourge

What causes aging? Scientists don't know for sure, but there appear to be many contributing factors. It's possible that aging is an unintended side effect of the mechanisms that reduce vulnerability to cancer. Cellular maintenance and repair mechanisms may also gradually break down, permitting damage to build up over time. At the same time, evolution is unlikely to favor the investment of resources in organisms that can no longer reproduce. And natural selection is unable to weed out genes whose deleterious effects don't occur until later in life.

In a sense, aging begins at birth. But it is more commonly associated with the wrinkles; gray hair; and declines in strength, mental sharpness, reproductive ability, wound healing, immunity, and other functions that occur after reaching adulthood. Other conditions that often accompany aging include cancer, dementia, osteoporosis, and arteriosclerosis.

The average life expectancy for humans has increased over the centuries with improvements in sanitation, health care, and food quality and availability. But maximum lifespan hasn't grown much, leading some scientists to speculate that there may be some kind of barrier around the age of 120. Others believe that, with the right technological advances, humans will be able to live much longer than that.

Of course, those additional years would be a burden if many of them were spent in ill health. So delaying aging while maintaining good overall health is the ultimate goal of researchers in this field.

Article Here

Bo

http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT00318019
This is a clinical study of OPC Factor, although completed no results have been posted. This is a very interesting site. There are several Resveratrol studies underway and recruiting, just use the search function at the top of the page.

The data does not support the conclusions that are being reported.

Great article...but this made me laugh...

Apparently he hasn't heard of Ancel Keys

The degree to which CRON can extend human life span is indeed open to debate and is the subject of vigorous discussion within the scientific community. However, many researchers do believe the evidence to date shows the practice of CRON will extend human life span, but consensus has not yet been reached on this topic.

Please accept that the evidence for at least some healthy life extension is compelling. I could spend the rest of the week citing articles from the past few years to illustrate this point.

It is very clear that calorie restriction with optimal nutrition has a powerful, protective effect against many diseases associated with aging ... It’s unknown how long each individual actually will end up living, but they certainly have a much longer life expectancy than average because they're most likely not going to die from a heart attack, stroke or diabetes.

Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition (CRON), is simply a tool to make you healthier, and thus enable you to keep up with what you enjoy in life.

Please relax, it’s merely a healthy lifestyle and nothing more.

Bo

One man's healthy lifestyle is another man's neurotic eating disorder.

Memory, thinking improved for those who ate less, study found

Eating less to remember more might become a new prescription for some elderly people, German researchers say.

They found that memory and thinking skills improved among healthy, overweight subjects who cut their calorie intake by 30 percent over a three-month period.

The study suggests that the calorie restriction may boost memory and cognition by reducing insulin resistance and inflammation, which may be linked to age-related cognitive decline. Improvements in memory could be especially important, the study added, because memory losses are an early indication of Alzheimer's disease and its precursor, mild cognitive impairment.

The research also tested whether a dietary increase in unsaturated fatty acids, such as the omega-3 fatty acids found in some fish, would yield similar benefits. Although these healthy fats have spurred better cognitive performance in rats, the new study failed to find a similar effect in humans.

The 49 men and women in the study had a mean age of 60.5 years and a body mass index of 28. Body mass index is a measure of overweight and obesity, with overweight starting at a BMI of 25 and obesity at 30.

Those in the calorie-restriction group were not told what to eat but were advised to cut portions and not to eat less than 1,200 calories daily.

The calorie restrictors lost an average of five pounds, with those who most closely adhered to the dietary recommendations losing an average of eight pounds. This subset with the largest weight loss also showed the biggest improvements in memory performance.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Bo

I wish these studies would just lower carbs instead of calories overall. There's no way of telling whether it's a reduction in calories in general or just the lowering of carbs which happens with a lowering of calories that causes the good results. I also wonder if on the diet people were taken off their processed food.

Doesn't this only prove that losing weight, or having a beter BMI, helps with memory?

It would seem that to most easily cut calories, fat, not carbs, would be cut, no?

There are indeed some who live their lives obsessed with counting calories and restrained eating.

For that select few, the pleasures of eating are replaced by punitive dietary regimens and chronic hunger where avoiding death becomes the main preoccupation of living and takes on more of a religious ideology than sound science.

Bo

See, I would think that the entire diet would be different. It wouldn't surprise me if breads were cut out, processed crap (both fats and carbs), and were replaced with lean meat, fruits and veggies, etc. The easiest way to eat a reduced calorie diet is a ketogenic diet, but I doubt they did that.

I am quickly moving toward a Mediteranean, low calorie, wine drinking diet. I am never hungry and exercize daily. I eat no processed or fast food. I think most Americans confuse desire with hunger. The few times in my life that I experienced what I call true hunger were directly attributable to a drop in blood sugar levels. I am not obsessed with anything, I have just grown tired of ridiculus diets, and I have finally accepted moderation as the best path. Whoever it was that said "Eat to live, Don't live to eat" hit the nail on the head.