Will Eating Less Make You Live Longer?

diet. But those findings disagree with research by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Maryland, also in the United States. Rozalyn Anderson, of the Wisconsin team, says the research is not intended as a recommendation of calorie restriction. 'I find the idea monumentally unattractive!' she says. 'We study it because it is so effective at delaying ageing and the onset of age-related disease. It's a way to tease out what it is that creates increased disease vulnerability as a function of age.' B Both groups started long-term trials on rhesus monkeys in the late 1980s to determine whether calorie restriction would extend the lifespan of primates. In mice many experiments had come to the same finding: feed them a diet with 30% fewer calories and see a lifespan extension of 40%. The monkey trials were set up a similar way: researchers took the calorie content of a standard monkey diet, cut it by 30% (while continuing to supply all essential nutrients) and monitored whether those monkeys lived longer, healthier lives than those on the standard diet. C In 2009, with the monkeys approaching old age, preliminary findings of the two trials started coming in. For the Wisconsin monkeys, calorie restriction seemed to be…