May You Be Forever Young

Mary at CRON Diary has a post on grocery store alienation:

It occurred to me, while shopping, that the problem is really that food means something very different to me than it does to the other shoppers. That’s all. It’s tasty nourishment to me. It’s entertainment and pleasure to them. So, lots of things in the store are inappropriate for me. They are food-tainment and not nourishing at all. After thinking this, my distress shifted to annoyance.

Another example of calorie restriction in mainstream media: Eat less, live long in Australia’s rag the Daily Telegraph.

A growing number of middle-aged Australians are joining a “calorie restriction” movement in a drastic bid to live for longer.

Note the characterisation as “drastic”.

Also:

Arthur Everitt, Honorary Associate Professor at Concord Hospital and Sydney University, follows the principles of calorie restriction with a diet high in fruits and vegetables plus some protein.

The 83-year-old, who has been researching ageing and calorie restriction in rats for more than 50 years, warns baby-boomers may be leaving the diet a bit too late.

“Calorie restriction should really be started early in life as a young teenager or adult,'’ he said.

“It’s extremely difficult to do but I think almost everyone can reduce the amount of food they eat, even if it’s by five per cent.

Via Digg.

Senior Journal cites research that says older folks can benefit from calorie restriction, even if they start it later in life.

Physiological changes associated with aging include cell damage and the emergence of cancer cells. The most important effects of low calorie diets and longevity therapeutics given late in life may not be to prevent this damage, but instead to stimulate the body to eliminate damaged cells that may become cancerous, and to stimulate repair in damaged cells like neurons and heart cells.

Low calorie diets drive the body to replace and repair damaged cells. This process usually slows down as we age, but low calorie diets make the body re-synthesize and turn over more cells – a situation associated with youth and good health.

The article focuses on the researcher’s search for CR mimetics. But it is interesting to see that they seem to think it’s never too late to start.

High-profile calorie restriction practitioner April has pointed out that CNN posted some CR recipes in anticipation of a segment that includes her by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. The recipes include a MegaBrownies.

Perhaps more interesting, in anticipation of the interest the article will generate, she’s posted an excellent FAQ, giving links to articles that cover a lot of basics as well as attitudinal questions people ask, including:

Are you trying to convince other people to practice CR? No.

Are you all just rich snotty holier than thou selfish people who want to make other people miserable by being thin and healthy and eating kale?

What’s the difference between this and an eating disorder?

Yeah, but do you have any fun?

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on a University of Sydney study into eating habits.

Obesity experts are conducting a three-year trial that aims to prove people keep eating until they have satisfied their appetite for protein.

The study will involve groups of volunteers kept in laboratory conditions for a week at a time and fed carefully manipulated diets.

The project’s chief investigator, Professor Stephen Simpson, said the study will test his “protein leverage hypothesis” that high-protein diets, such as the CSIRO Total Wellbeing and Atkins, work not because they cut out carbohydrates but because they are high in protein.

The theory follows the observation that insects such as locusts move in swarms to areas providing enough protein for their diet.

Humans don’t move, they eat more.

There is, of course, no single way to do calorie restriction. Skinnybitch uses the three main kinds of Judaism (reform, orthodox, and conservative) as an analogy to the approaches people take to CR.

Now, in general, Jews aren’t interested in converting people, but in recent years, reformed groups have been very welcoming of “lapsed” Jews and Gentiles who are interested in converting. Conservatives historically haven’t been that into this sort of thing, though I’ve read a few articles suggesting that might be changing a little. However, the hard-core Orthodox types don’t seem remotely interested in converting anyone. They do try to get people who are already Jewish to be more observant, but they aren’t trying to convince Gentiles to get circumcised or to start keeping kosher.

In my analogy, you’re sort of like the reformed Jews. You like the spirit of calorie restriction but you aren’t interested in quibbling over details like the precise amount of cheese on your sandwich. You also care about how non-CRONies perceive CRON because, I assume, you hope to convince a broader audience that 1) CRON is doable and therefore 2) maybe they should give it a whirl.

April is more like the Orthodox types. She demands great precision in her CRON practice - a level of precision that you think is not worth worrying about. She’s willing to talk about what she does but she isn’t really trying to convert people to her lifestyle. She recognizes that not everyone is cut out for this sort of thing. And she has repeatedly stated that there is value in practicing more moderate CRON. It’s just not, in her own estimation, enough to reach her goals.

Works for me. Read the whole thing.

For those trying to get a heuristic on how much food it takes to eat 200 calories so you can eat less of them, Wisegeek presents What Does 200 Calories Look Like?”. My favourites were the bagel and the doughnut. The bagel is heavier, so you have to eat less of the shape. (Not that I’m doughnut-ly inclined at all.)

Via Reddit.

April points us to the New York Magazine, where there’s an article she’s in on calorie restriction. The tone strikes me as a bit too clever. Or snotty. But on the whole, it comes across favourable, especially since the journo has been doing CR for a few months leading up to the dinner that’s the structure of the story.

Snippets:

It isn’t hard to see the diet’s appeal: You’re skinnier than any social X-ray, you’re practicing a regimen as extreme and as grueling as any yogi’s, and you’ve got some impressive medical science on your side.

And:

Cooking for [Michael Rae] is the same elaborate exercise in dietary Sudoku it is for all CR die-hards, only more so.

And:

“The focus of CR is health. Nobody here is trying to figure out how to eat less and disappear. The constant thought is, ‘How can I pack more nutrition into my calories?’—and that’s not something an anorexic is doing. Anorexia is slow suicide.”

And this wee gem, which, to me, says more about the writer than the subjects:

All evening, I have let the bubbling enthusiasm and essential reasonableness of my guests carry me past the little weirdnesses that go with being calorie-restricted. But the weirdnesses are starting to pile up, and my guests are looking weirder and weirder themselves, like emissaries from a future I’m not sure could ever feel like home: a world where the food grows in vats, where the porn industry just barely survives on government subsidies, where the physically ideal male has the BMI of Mary-Kate Olsen and the skin tones of an Oompa-Loompa.

Anyway, worth a read.

April’s CR Diary asks “Has anyone in your family ever died?” In a post called I Have Good Genes, she responds to people who claim they do.

If anyone at any point in your family has died or is currently dead, then I suggest that your genes are not so great. They may have lived a long time or danced the polka through their nineties, but they eventually grew old and died. The whole point of the research that Aubrey de Grey is doing and that MR is working with him on is to find therapies that actually reverse the aging process, making death, well, not absolutely unavoidable but a lot less likely to come as soon as it comes now.

I like that because it sets a high standard. I want our kids and grandkids to look back at people dying the way they do now with the sort of numb lack of understanding that we look back on death the way it happened in the 1800s and before. I want the discussion of death by aging to get dumped into the same heap as the discussions we have now with our kids about life before remote controlled TVs, mobile phones, and the Internet.

Let’s hope it happens, and soon. As April says, “Nobody’s genes are that good.”

A Mount Sinai School of Medicine study indicates that caloric restriction helps “calm or even reverse symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD)”.

This study is the first to suggest that caloric restriction through promotion of SIRT1 (a molecule associated with brain longevity) may initiate a cascade of events like the activation of alpha-secretase which can prevent AD amyloid neuropathology. Since alpha-secretase is known also to inhibit the generation of beta-amyloid peptides in the AD affected brain, the study demonstrates a mechanism by which dietary caloric restriction might benefit AD. Most remarkably, the study finds that a high caloric intake based on saturated fat promotes AD type beta-amyloidosis, while caloric restriction based on reduced carbohydrate intake is able to prevent it.

Via ScienceDaily.