Chemical concoctions can smooth over wrinkles and hide those pesky grays, but what about the signs of aging that aren't so easy to fix, such as losing muscle mass? Cutting calories early could help, say University of Florida researchers.

Severely restricting calories leads to a longer life, scientists have proved. New research now has shown for the first time that such a diet also can maintain physical fitness into advanced age, slowing the seemingly inevitable progression to physical disability and loss of independence.

The study showed that the diet reduces the amount of visceral fat, which expresses inflammatory factors that in humans cause chronic disease and a decline in physical performance and vitality across the lifespan.

The stumbling block on this path to remaining forever young is that humans may not adhere to such a severe diet.

Have we finally discovered the Fountain of Youth?

No. But we may be getting a little closer.

Source - Journals of Gerontology

I've heard of this.. I saw an interview on tv with a guy who restricted his calories and he looked SO much better than he previously did. Before, he looked his age.. After he had been restricting his calories (he started eating HALF the amount he was before) he looked at LEAST 8-10 years younger than he was.

I'm not sure if its because of calorie restriction, or because you're forced to eat A LOT of fresh foods.. veggies, fruit, fresh (possibly raw) fish, etc. And if you're going on with all of that and eating that many fresh foods, you might as well go organic if you can. So then, is it a calorie thing? Or a fresh food thing?

And how does this have anything to do with low carb diets??? This is a low carb forum!

One of the In The News items that Mike put on our homepage got my attention enough to merit a click. The article focused on a newly reported study showing that eating fewer calories will make a rat (and possibly by extension, a human) live longer. On its face, this is a real dog bites man story, since it’s been known for eons that caloric restriction in rats, monkeys, and even in humans will extend lifespan. The news, however, is that instead of the extreme 40% reduction of calories many of the early trials adopted–a Spartan regimen that makes even rats and monkeys depressed–the reduction of this study was modest. Reducing the rats’ intake by only 8% of total calories increased their longevity.

What’s not mentioned in this paper, or for that matter in most reports of caloric restriction and longevity, is that because of the basic structure of lab animals’ diets, the lion’s share of the calorie cutting comes from cutting their carbs. Protein in their chow has to stay about the same, fat is already pretty low, and so the big chunk of any reduced calorie lab protocol comes from restricting carbs.

That’s what makes this study so important to you and me. If indeed, cutting a mere 8% of calories per day can improve health and extend life, we’re in luck; most of us are already there. Like the rats, we’ve carved our reduction out of the carb category. The trick is not to replace all of it with something else.

Dr. Mary Eades

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmd_blog/?p=72

The fat fast is low calorie...high fat. Maybe for a longer term diet one could add in more protein and less fat. (shrug)
I wonder if there is anyone who has tried something like this. Intentionally tried to eat low cal/low carb. I guess it would be pretty easy to fall into a dangerous level...like the Kimkins diet.

I guess because maybe there are people that eat LCarb and LCal? Its interesting.

Bobo..and what effect does this have to do with the vegetarian diet that actually prohibits far more foods..like the beef fetish thingy, than low carb does?

Does it make you re-evaluate your own ideas?

The very concept of cutting calories to maintain muscle mass is absurd. Everywhere else we advise to increase calories especially protein to maintain muscle mass. How could eating less cause us to retain more muscle? It's impossible to reconcile the two hypotheses.



No. Scientists have proven that they don't know what, in the food they feed to monkeys, affects longevity and that the only solution they found was to reduce total calories and see what gives. The next logical step is to isolate the longevity factor. "Calories" doesn't cut it. However it is known that in at least one species C. elegans glucose has a significant and dramatic effect on longevity. Taubes mentions this in GCBC.

"Calories" doesn't cut it because a calorie is a measure of the thermodynamic potential of food. How we measure this is by setting the food afire. Hardly representative of what happens in the human body unless you have an artificial heart that runs on petrol. On the other hand, we know what happens with glucose in the human body and it does nothing good in large quantity.

The alternative is that they know what affects longevity but they designed the study in such a way to show that it's not the agent i.e. glucose but the total calories that makes a difference. By cutting total calories, we invariably cut total glucose. Oh how devious.



We are not monkeys.
We are not monkeys.
We are not monkeys.
We are not adapted to a low fat, high carb, restricted diet diet.
We are adapted to the complete opposite:
A zero carb, high fat, abundant calorie diet.



The stumbling block is that malnourished humans are inherently stupid. Before the scientists can make any progress in nutritional science, they'll have to eat properly themselves. How can they do this when they can't even see that the diet they eat is in fact poison that makes them too stupid too see this? Catch 22.



No. But we have discovered yet one more example of blatant moronic behavior. It's not their fault, they believe that carbohydrate is food to humans.

These guys halved their calories too...

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.

I agree that this is no fountain of youth discovery....but would add that I do think that carbohydrate does have a place in the human food chain.

I do not think it's supposed to be our primary source of energy (obviously) but I do think, if we look at things from seasonality and availability - carbohydrate would play a role in our ability to survive times of less than abundance by enabling us to store fat to have stored energy. We see this clearly in animals in the wild - they fatten up during times of plenty (warmer seasons and/or times when plants produce foods to consume) and then live off what's available in leaner times with their fat stores. I don't think we're much different.....we just eat differently now and store fat year-round instead of going into winter.

I don't think carbohydrate is supposed to be any source of energy for humans because it is such a poor fuel. But then we think that growing fat is normal. We then justify this line of thinking by hypothesizing further. We believe that we must have developed this mechanism to store surplus fuel for times of scarcity. At first glance this is a reasonable evolutionary argument but don't stop there. There's a competing hypothesis that says fat cells serve a temporary function both immediately after birth to insure an adequate supply of fat to the child, and during adulthood to serve as a temporary fuel buffer for the time we sleep. We are hyperphagic on a high fat zero carb diet but we don't grow fat from it. We only grow fat from a high carb diet.

This is the strongest evolutionary argument against carbohydrates. If growing fat was normal for humans, then we'd have to show that it is an evolutionary advantage. I see one clear disadvantage to growing fat: Becoming easy prey. The prey don't reproduce therefore we can't be the descendants of fat people. Growing fat is abnormal from an evolutionary perspective. Therefore a diet that causes us to grow fat is abnormal as well.

If carbs served the purpose of keeping us alive until our next fat animal kill, it's hardly a reason to keep eating carbs all year round. It merely confirms that we are not adapted to a high carb diet. We are not herbivores, we are carnivores. Our food is precisely the animals that grow fat on plant food. This is the diet we are adapted to from a few millions years of eating it.

Only by believing that carbohydrate is food do we believe that cutting total calories benefits humans. We are hyperphagic by nature yet we don't grow fat on a high fat zero carb diet, how can we justify eating less? We can't unless we can show that carbohydrate i.e. monkey food is food for humans as well.

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.

Martin, you're setting up so many different logical fallacies, I'm not even sure where to start in reply!

First you bring in fat stores in pregnancy, but point to the wrong reason fat is laid down in pregnancy -- it isn't for adequate fat to go to the fetus/baby, but to insure two things....first is energy required during labor (there was a huge paper a few years ago about the benefits of ketosis for delivery and the role of body fat stores to acheive ketosis during labor) and second isn't for supply of fat to the baby, but for lactation - so the woman has adequate stores of energy to produce milk to feed her infant.

Which interestingly Martin, if carbohydrate was not part of the human diet, why then is breastmilk rich with fat and carbohydrate? It's actually "low" in protein (by gram weight - it's actually the right amount by weight of the infant and its requirements for amino acids). If it were that we only need protein and fat, the first perfect food - breastmilk - would contain no carbohydrate!

You mix apples and oranges, making the implication that by my statement that carbohydrate is indeed part of the human diet that it then must mean a high carbohydrate diet is normal. I have never said that, nor do my words imply such....re-read what I wrote, and it's clear I said that carbohydrate has a place in our diet and I believe it is to serve an evolutionary advantage to maintain us, by allowing us to accumulate adequate fat stores, to survive and reproduce.

DO NOT FORGET a woman is infertile without adequate body fat stores - low body fat renders the female reproductive system null-and-void....it won't work without the right level of body fat......without a means to lay body fat, how exactly do women - if they consume a mostly carbohydrate-free diet - lay down body fat if you....as you suggest....cannot without carbohydrate?

Ah - but we do lay down fat and can in the absence of carbohydrate because it is NOT the carbohydrate driving fat storage, it's the INSULIN....right? So what else potentially allows us to lay down fat in the absence of carbs? Anyone? Anyone? Ferris?

Excess glucose is detrimental to cellular function - but glucose is hardly "poison" when you consider if we don't eat foods that convert to glucose, we make it ourselves to provide the glucose our cells require and need!