Caloric Restriction and Immune Aging
There is an excellently written article in The Scientist: Caloric restriction slows immune aging.
The link between caloric restriction and longevity may be mediated by reduced susceptibility to disease, researchers report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists found that calorie-restricted older adult rhesus monkeys have at least 30% more naïve T cells than controls.
Two points I’d like to emphasize: Caloric restriction is not synonymous to starvation, as some headlines make it. Also, I have to agree with co-author Ilhem Messaoudi when he said towards the end of the article that increasing the lifespan is not the end-all and be-all.
“What I’d love to see is how caloric restriction affects hearing, eyesight, muscle strength, wound-healing…If caloric restriction slows down the change in three or four of these systems, then [there is] a strong case that aging is being slowed regardless of how the lifespan data comes out.”
Afterall, what good is it to live for so long, if all your functions have deteriorated?
For those interested in learning more on how diet are thought to influence aging, there’s The Longevity Diet: Discover Calorie Restriction, which has received fairly good editorial reviews and customer feedback, and for those into technical literature, there’s Caloric Restriction: A Key to Understanding and Modulating Aging (Research Profiles in Aging).
