April's CR Diary

Sounds delicious! I made ground turkey chili the other evening and have tried a couple of Morrocan-type dishes recently. Must be the wintery weather that makes us think about making spicy, hearty dishes. JD :-)

I have a CRON question and I figured this was as good a post as any on which to ask it.

Okay, so a couple of posts back, I was asking you about studies which appear to show that humans are healthier when they weigh more. You said that this was correlation rather than causation. "The slightly heavier people who are healthier than people with wasting diseases aren't healthier because they have more fat, they're healthier because they don't smoke, have wasting diseases, etc."

Here's my question. Doesn't that still indicate that it's better to have some padding? If thinness tends to be a response to illness, anorexia, or smoking, then isn't that a sign that we're not supposed to be thin?

A healthy *ferret*, after all, one which is unburdened by disease and getting plenty of food and exercise, is skinny. A healthy otter isn't. If healthy humans generally aren't skinny, then doesn't that mean we're "otters"? If so, is it wise to drive our weight down at all, even with optimal nutrition? Shouldn't we be trying instead to reproduce the conditions of the healthiest average humans?

Here's what worries me about CRON. This is probably going to sound superstitious and unscientific, but if CRON makes your body think it's in a famine, doesn't that automatically mean CRON is unhealthy, no matter how many RDAs it delivers and no matter how good a CRONie's bloodwork is? (What if the health of a CRONie is just a correlation?)

Bodies don't want to starve. They fight back by thinning and increasing hunger signals. Think about that. Isn't that actually illogical? If a body thinks it's in a famine, why doesn't it *shut down* hunger signals? Hunger is very agitating, after all, and might cause a starving person to waste energy trying to pursue that which obviously isn't available or they'd be eating it already.

But no; the body gets good and hungry. Doesn't that actually sound like a failsafe? A protective override against any effort to voluntarily induce starvation or semi-starvation?

I can hear you saying "Well duh. But see, I've outsmarted that failsafe by making sure I get 100% RDAs, so I don't actually need the calories my body thinks it does."

But what if you do? What if part of what makes the standard 2000/2500 diet healthy is not just its RDAs but its bulk?

Probably there's a lot of misconceptions in here. But that's what's on my mind right now, and I was interested in your perspective if you think it's worthwhile to respond.

Yvonne,

All I can do is refer you to the mountains of science on CR. All of which indicate that in every animal in which it has been tested, Calorie Restriction is the only thing that slows the biological aging process. Whether or not this makes sense to you is irrelevant. We don't know why it works, and many theories have been disproven. The fact remains that in every animal in which it has been tested, it does in fact work.
Evidence, not mechanistic speculation, is what I prefer to make my decisions based on.

Will it work in humans? That remains to be seen.

Evolution doesn't favor longevity: it favors maximal reproduction. CR doesn't help one make the most babies possible before dying, it helps one live longer. So of course biologically hardwired responses are going to make one a bit stressed when confronted with the lack of food. Those of us who choose to act as rational agents, rather than simply obeying our biological programming, must decide what our priorities are and act accordingly.

I heartily recommend Dr. Walford's _Beyond 120 Year Diet_. Some of his nutritional recs are outdated, but the basic science is there. I feel like you owe it to yourself to do some more research since you're obviously thinking seriously about these topics. You can also find more info at http://www.calorierestriction.org.

a

Thanks again April!