Fewer Calories, Better Cell Performance

Calorie restriction, reducing calorie intake by 40% or so while maintaining optimal micronutrient intake, is the most reliable way to upregulate all of the cellular maintenance processes that act to improve cell and tissue function. This response to famine evolved very early on in the history of life on our planet, and near all organisms assessed by the research community have a cellular metabolism that operates more efficiently when calories intake is restricted. While everyone should consider trying calorie restriction, given the health benefits it conveys, and given that it costs nothing, it isn't the path to a sizable extension of life span in our species. Efforts to recreate even thin slices of the metabolic response to calorie restriction have proven to be challenging, despite an investment of billions and decades, and even the best present development programs achieve little in the grand scheme of what might be possible given better approaches to the problem of aging. They will only modestly slow aging, not radically change the length of human life. The number of calories a person eats directly influences the performance of different cells. One experiment on mice shows how a low calorie diet can protect the brain from neuronal cell death associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, epilepsy, and cerebral vascular accident (CVA). The mice were divided into two groups. The researchers calculated the average number of calories the group with no calo...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs