CR people

[prog]

Story from New York Magazine about a Calorie Restriction diet subculture. That is, people who eat as few calories per day as they can, carefully measuring out exactly the nutrient quantities their body needs and not a scrap more, with the hope that it will add (all things being equal) decades to their lifespan.

I had heard about the experiments with lab animals, where it's proven to work, but didn't know that people were doing this. I imagined that nobody would want to live in a state of constant hunger.

This sounds exactly like the sort of thing I'd jump into wheeee and then forget about two days later. Still quite intriguing.

Comments

[dictator555.livejournal.com]

Alan Alda interviewed a man who does the calorie restricted diet thing for one of his Scientific American Frontiers episodes. He also went into the labs that tested the diet on animals. It was an interesting episode. Don't remember the name, and not sure you can find it online, but maybe it'll come around on tv.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

The thing to remember is: calorie restriction significantly extends the lives of rats and mice, but that doesn't mean it will do so for humans.

Lots of things cure cancer in rats and mice that do nothing for humans because rats and mice get cancer at the drop of a hat. Humans are nearly impervious to cancer, so the ones that get by our natural defenses are real ly nasty, while the ones rats and mice get are mostly nothing much. So lots of stuff works for them that doesn't work for us.

With respect to lifespan, one way to normalize it is to measure lifespan in heartbeats. Mammals tend to live for about a billion heartbeats. Cats 1.2E9, dogs 0.7E9, hampsters 0.7E9, horses 0.9E9, cows 0.75E9, pigs 0.9E9, rabbits 1.0E9, elephants 1.1E9... Humans: 2.2E9.

Ergo, it is pretty likely that there will be a LOT of life-extension techniques that work well for non-humans and have no effect on humans at all, because we're already pretty highly optimized for lifespan.

[grr-plus1.livejournal.com]

One major problem is more that very few people would be able to stay on the CR diet. My guess is that those who do stay on it are metabolic oddities with unusual abilities to control their appetite. There's also a bit too much of a semblance of self-delusion while dancing around anorexia. So, even if there were health benefits (the claims of which I would guess are exaggerated, or at least not really backed up by clinical studies), this is not the immediate wave of the future - because, currently, 99% of the population would be physically/mentally incapable of choosing to stay on the CR diet.

[prog.livejournal.com]

To this I say: bingo.