April's CR Diary

You aren't eating egg whites these days. Is there a reason for that? I eat one a day and wonder if I shouldn't.

Hi Connie,

I'm still eating eggwhites, I just went through a phase when I didn't feel like eating them as much. MR is eating fewer eggwhites these days than before because he is somewhat concerned about a *new* study on methionine restriction, and he promises that he will write a post on this as soon as he possibly can. But at my level of CR, he doesn't think I need to worry about methionine (that word never looks properly spelled,so apologies if it isn't) restriction, and my guess is that he would say (make your own decisions, of course) that unless you're pretty hardcore in your CR, there's no point in you worrying about it.

I've been eating a whole lot of nonfat dairy at home because with as much eating out as I've had to do for work, I have to pack all my calcium into my other meals. Hence sometimes it's dairy for breakfast, not eggwhites.

I still advocate the high protein breakfast for appetite control, if you're finding mid morning hunger to be an issue.

a

"Not content to accept the slow pathetic march towards degeneration and death that everyone around us seems to think is just fine."

Actually, nobody is particularly excited about getting older. Everyone would rather be 21 physically if they could. And who knows, maybe they can someday. Space flight and wireless communication used to be impossible fantasies too.

You do realize, though, that death is part of what regenerates life? Plants and animals die, decompose into the soil, help the soil grow new plants which nourish the new animals, blah de blah? Most humans have cut themselves out of this exchange by burying their dead in boxes or cremating them--denying them to the earth (a trend that's starting to reverse itself in the phenomenon of green burial). So it's easy to lose sight of the fact that death serves an ecological purpose. It's composting, basically. Life passes into another physical form to support life. Arguably, death is not a disease or malfunction at all, but a kind of natural estate tax: "You ate the plants and animals nurtured in part by the plants and animals that came before...now it's your turn. Pass it on." It's the self-perpetuation of a closed system. Pretty elegant, actually.

If death is not a malfunction, but just the way the system keeps itself going, should we seek to overcome it? I'm not talking about finding substitutes for the compost-enrichment part of the system. We've mostly already done that. I'm thinking more of a GMO/Frankenfoods type of thing. Do we want to tamper? What if our minds don't do so well after 200 to 300 years? I know that you're not just willing but eager to take that risk. More power to you. I hope you reach your dream. But I think you should consider the possibility that you're just plain wrong in viewing the "degeneration" of aging as a negative aberration, and that it might be a bad idea to fix what ain't broke. This is not to say aging/death is 'good.' We can all agree it pretty much sucks. But it might be *necessary* in ways we don't yet understand.

"Nature is bright and beautiful, but nature is also terrible, dark, and cruel." --Ursula K. LeGuin

Yvonne,

I've spent a lot of time over the last three years answering the objections you raise. If you look back at the entries from January - May of 2005, you'll find most of that.

a

Ah. I have not gone back that far in your archives. I will try to do that. Thanks.

Yvonne, I wanted to add: Everyone eventually dies, and even if the aging problem is cracked and people don't die of "natural causes" anymore, everyone will still die, just later, from any number of different causes. The world, after all, is a dangerous place.

Nothing is immortal, it's probably the case that nothing CAN be immortal. Even stars die.

So, even if you're right that death is somehow necessary, no worries! It's going to happen anyway eventually, to all of us.