Reviewing Recent Progress in Investigations of Calorie Restriction and Fasting

A great deal of present day research is in one way or another focused on forms of lowered calorie intake. There are those who seek to fully map the mechanisms by which calorie restriction and intermittent fasting improve health and extend life significantly in short lived species. There are those who are trying to sufficiently quantify the benefits to be able to produce robust calorie-specific medical diets. There are those who are trying to find pharmaceuticals that partially replicate the changes induced by nutrient sensing regulators of metabolism, and thus improve health without eating less. Any investigation of the mechanisms of calorie restriction and intermittent fasting is a complex business: a lower calorie intake produces sweeping changes in the behavior of cells and systems in the body, and metabolism is far from completely understood. The research community will only understand the fine details of exactly how eating less increases life span when they understand the fine details of cellular metabolism as a whole: how variations in metabolism determines variations in pace of aging. The achievement of that challenging goal lies decades in the future, which is one good reason not to bet on calorie restriction and fasting mimetic drugs to produce large gains in human life span any time soon. The worldwide increase in life expectancy has not been paralleled by an equivalent increase in healthy aging. Developed and developing countries are facing social a...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs