Friday, August 31, 2012

just plain cruel....

So bloggers from "both sides" are looking at the NIH study which "proves" that caloric restriction does not prolong life in the rhesus monkey.  ...I don't think the proof is quite final.

I'm inclined to side with Dr. Rosedale upon learning that the poor things were eating a low-cal diet all their lives, which was 60% carbohydrate.  Imagine how hungry they must have been!  I think that the depression that you see in human beings eating like this should be factored into the mortality rates.  Anybody but me ever read "When the Body Says No"?

Imagine eating 30% below normal intake of calories through your growth spurts and reproductive years.  Then think about 60% of the calories you ARE allowed to eat, being things that will spike blood-sugar ... and the low-sugar "hungries" that follow.  I think that's just plain cruel.

5 comments:

  1. I would think the carbohydrate content would matter more to what their natural diet was as to whether it was cruel or not. Hopefully they fed them mostly real foods and not that purified stuff like they did in the Wisconsin study. Granted the restricted calorie diet is cruel either way, but how you going to do that study otherwise?

    Do you read the "Dr. Fatty Finds Fitness" blog? From the limited reading I've done, she seems to follow a high carb diet, exercises like mad, and eats around 1000 calories or so. She told me in the comments yesterday she wasn't hungry which I find would not compare to any of my experiences when eating carbs.

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  2. i haven't read her very much, but i'm astonished she can do that and not be ravenous. even back in the day when i weighed fifteen pounds less than i do now and DIDN'T exercise a lot, i was always hungry on low-fat.

    you're right about the monkeys and their normal diets.... one point i tried to make still goes, though -- calorie restriction through growth periods has got to have physical and mental repercussions.

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  3. Ive posted this elsewhere but the PEPCK-C mouse is already evidence that calorie restriction is not responsible for longevity. There is something else going on. It seems what important is not how many calories you eat, but what you DO with those calories.

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  4. :-) now i have to go hunt down that post to satisfy my curiosity....

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  5. Tess the researchers website is below, basically they over-express the PEPCK enzyme in skeletal muscle only, the result is a super-mouse that has incredibly high exercise endurance, eats 60% more calories, and lives 40% longer.

    http://www.pepck-and-the-ketogenic-diet.com/index.html

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