Long a subject of debate—and experiments with everything from yeast to mice—the question of whether a lower calorie diet increases life span while decreasing disease has a new smorgasbord of evidence.

A 20-year-long rhesus monkey study, released today in Science, found that monkeys that consumed 30 percent less calories than average peers were one third as likely to get a age-related disease and were likely to live longer. 

Of the monkeys in the trial, 80 percent of those on the restricted diet are still alive, whereas just half of those that ate as they pleased are still around.

Hold the salt.

Americans are eating far more salt than is healthy, and those for whom it's especially dangerous  (including the elderly, African-Americans and people with high blood pressure) are consuming twice as much as they should, federal health officials warned yesterday. Too much salt raises the risk of hypertension, which is linked to heart disease and stroke.
 
“It’s important for people to eat less salt. People who adopt a heart healthy eating pattern that includes a diet low in sodium and rich in potassium and calcium can improve their blood pressure,” Darwin Labarthe, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, said in a statement released after the agency reported on the trend in this week's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). “Reducing sodium intake can prevent or delay increases in blood pressure for everyone.’’

Is that extra bite of red meat really going to kill you? If it's your fourth ounce in a day, it might.

People who eat the most red meat daily (about four ounces) are about a third more likely to die over a given decade than those who eat the least (about 19 grams), according to new research set to be published tomorrow in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Conversely, those who eat the most white meat have an 8 percent lower risk of dying compared with people who eat the least.

The findings are based on the eating habits of half a million men and women who were followed for 10 years by scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The researchers did not calculate the absolute risk of dying based on a red-meat vs. white-meat diet, co-author Rashmi Sinha, a senior investigator there, tells ScientificAmerican.com. But she writes that if everyone lowered  his or her red meat intake to 19 grams a day or less, 11 percent fewer men and 16 percent fewer women would die.

We hate to break it to you, but it looks like soda isn't good for you after all.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning the Coca-Cola Company to revise its labeling of Diet Coke Plus so that it doesn't mislead consumers into believing that the pop, a brew of chemicals mixed in with some vitamins and minerals, is healthy.

A letter posted on the FDA's Web site yesterday tells Coke that the soda is "misbranded" because only products that contain at least 10 percent more of the Reference Daily Intake (RDI) or Daily Reference Value (DRV) for a given nutrient "than an appropriate reference food" can legally call themselves "plus." The Diet Coke Plus label doesn't name such a reference food, says the FDA. RDI refers to how much daily consumption of a particular nutrient is sufficient for healthy adults, and it's included in the DRVs on nutrition labels that base those values on caloric intake.

Parents beware: diluting infant formula can be deadly. Just ask a cash-strapped Tampa, Fla., woman who, in an attempt to save money and stretch out meals for her hungry five-month-old son, watered down his formula, unwittingly causing a potentially fatal condition known as water intoxication.

"If I had known it was harmful," Jeri Moss, 23, said during a news conference held Monday to alert other parents, "I never would have done it."

She said that her son, La'Damian Barton, had a seizure and stopped breathing last week during a trip to the grocery store; she performed CPR and rushed him to nearby University Community Hospital, where he was revived. He came home this week, and doctors said he's expected to make a full recovery.