Restricted Diet & Longer Lifespan

Would you reduce your calorie intake (while still maintaining a healthy diet) if it meant living a longer life, putting off diseases brought on by age?

If so, you may be interested in a recent study. Monkeys who ate less lived longer, healthier lives! That’s what researchers found at the end of a 20-year study with rhesus macaques.

Study results, published July 10 in the journal Science, indicate that consuming fewer calories, yet still maintaining a nutritious diet, leads to a longer and healthier life.

Researchers found that eating a reduced-calorie diet slows aging and significantly delays disorders that come on with age, like cancer, diabetes, brain atrophy and cardiovascular disease.

“There is a major effect of caloric restriction in increasing survival if you look at deaths due to the diseases of aging,” said Richard Weindruch, a professor of medicine in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Today, 33 animals remain in the study.

This rhesus macaque study, performed in Wisconsin, is valuable because it was done with animals that closely resemble humans. However, no similar comprehensive study with human subjects is being undertaken at this time. While this study can’t serve as conclusive evidence of the effects of a restricted calorie diet on human disease and lifespan, it gives us much to think about.

(Image via stock.xchng)