Calorie restriction lenghtens life
Eat less – live more! Within days this exciting news has spread throughout the world: experiments show that lab rats fed low-calorie diets live longer than the normal rats. They appear to be more active, smaller in size and much, much healthier. This miracle is called calorie restriction, the CR.
What not everybody knows is that the calorie restriction was already discovered in the 1930s and has shown to work in most animals, even insects like spiders. The equation that was made on hundreds of successful experiments is quite simple: Animals fed X% fewer calories than they usually eat live X% longer.
Calorie restriction optimal nutrition
Now, imagine if you do eat 10% less food every day and your original life expectancy is 70 years. Theoretically, you could live 7 years longer. And 10% is not much. If your daily calorie intake is about 2300 Kcal and you eat five healthy meals a day, you just need to cut 46 Kcal from each meal, that is, for example, 25gr of bread.
It sounds great, but where’s the evidence that man’s body reaction on CR will have the same results as on the animals? Well, on the genetic level, man IS an animal. So why shouldn’t those “tweaks” that work for animals have the same results on man? There are not so many clues for this. The only evidence from humans came in 1991, when eight subjects in the sealed Biosphere laboratory in Arizona desert unintentionally tested the theory when their food ran short. Their health appeared to improve markedly, according to a number of measures.
But this wasn’t the final evidence that the calorie restriction heightens the life expectancy just because the experiments on humans are quite new and you need much more time than for the lab rats, whose normal life expectancy is around 7 years, not 75.
Those, who don’t want to spend any more time waiting for more scientific evidences, have already switched to the new calorie restriction diet. “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” published a new study that showed “profound and sustained beneficial effects” in 18 people who had been eating very low calorie diets for 3 to 15 years:
They had much lower levels of “bad” cholesterol, much higher levels of “good” cholesterol, lower levels of triglycerides, very low blood pressure (their arteries looked more like those of children than middle-age adults) and blood sugar levels. Moreover, their body’s response to insulin was extremely high – they were on a very low risk for diabetes.
Calorie restriction diet theory
One theory says that cutting the calories leads to proportional cut in production of the harmful “free radicals” and a substance called c-reactive protein (CRP), which is believed to be responsible for inflammations in the body. Studies published in the TIMES magazine show that the inflammations produced by CPR are linked to high risk for heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer.
We still don’t know how long the humans will actually end up living using calorie restriction, but one is for sure: they will have a much longer life expectancy on average, because they’re most likely not going to die from heart attack, stroke or diabetes.
Cost: negative, you actually save while eating less!
