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Jul 9, 2009 | 9
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.
Mar 6, 2009 | 19
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A perennial grump? Always see the glass as half empty instead of half full? Might want to brighten up a bit – if, that is, you'd like to live longer. A new study says that the optimists among us may have a lower risk of heart disease and early death.
Researchers led by Hilary Tindle, an internist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, analyzed eight years of data on 97,253 women, age 50 and over, participating in the Women's Health Initiative, a 15-year study launched in 1991 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their findings, released this week at a conference of the American Psychosomatic Society in Chicago: the women who were most cheery were 30 percent less likely to die of heart disease and 14 percent less likely than their pessimistic peers to die from all causes during the study period. The results were even more striking among black women; the optimists among them were 38 percent less likely to die of heart disease and 33 percent less likely to die from all causes.
Jan 26, 2009 | 4
Scientists have long known that severely cutting food intake may lead to a longer life. But new research shows the phenom doesn't apply to everyone—or, should we say, to every mouse. A new study recently published in the online edition of The Journal of Nutrition found that reducing caloric intake only seems to prolong the lives of fat mice with low metabolisms.
"There has been this kind of settled paradigm that caloric restriction universally extends the life span of animals, [and] some have implied that it also applies to humans," says study lead author Rajindar Sohal, a pharmacologist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. But he notes that he and his colleagues found that "extension of lifespan by food reduction will occur only if there is an energy imbalance [caused by a low metabolism]."
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