The Calorie Restriction Society - for people trying to live longer by eating fewer calories

Welcome to the Calorie Restriction (CR) Society

Our goal is to help people of all ages live longer and healthier lives simply by:

• eating fewer calories
• maintaining adequate nutrition

Since the 1930's extensive scientific research has shown that calorie restricted (CR) diets improve health and extend lifespans of nearly every species tested, including worms, spiders, rodents, dogs, cows and monkeys. We believe it is likely that people who carefully adopt a CR diet will see similar results.

The CR Society supports the efforts of people who practice CR for future longevity, current health, or other benefits; those curious about or interested in understanding the effects of the diet; and those interested in the development of related, science-based life-extension and health-enhancing technologies. Our mailing lists provide a rich forum for such topical discussions.

Calorie Restriction...the only proven life-extension method known to modern science.

reposted from: http://www.calorierestriction.org/Home
my highlights / emphasis / edits

The Scent of a Calorie: Whiff of Food Cancels Longevity from Caloric Restriction

February 01, 2007 The Scent of a Calorie: Whiff of Food Cancels Longevity from Caloric Restriction Diet-restricted fruit flies start acting like they are eating when they smell nutrients By Nikhil Swaminathan

reposted from: Scientific American
my highlights / emphasis / edits

Image: © STOCKBYTE/CORBIS LIFE-SHORTENING AROMA: In fruit flies, scientists have determined that the smell of food can have a negative effect on caloric restriction diets, generally designed to impart a longer life.

Evidence began mounting as long as 70 years ago that restricting calories while consuming necessary amounts of sustenance could increase one's life span. Since then, a group called the North Carolina-based Calorie Restriction Society has sprouted whose 1,800 members routinely down about half of the daily caloric intake recommended by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the hope of living to the ripe old age of 120.

New research may prompt the organization to send out nose plugs with its next newsletter.

A team of scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, New Mexico State University at Las Cruces and the University of Houston found that the average life span of fruit flies on restricted diets decreased when they were exposed to food odors. The findings, according to lead researcher Scott Pletcher of Baylor's Huffington Center on Aging, suggest that the flies are "actually perceiving the environment," thinking they are in a nutrient-rich place and then their bodies are "adaptively responding to it." The results imply there is likely some olfactory component affecting humans on caloric restriction diets as well.

Pletcher's group exposed two lab strains of fruit flies on caloric restriction to smells created by live yeast, an important constituent of the fly's diet. These flies died three to 10 days sooner—a 6 to 18 percent reduction in life span—than flies on the same diet that did not get a whiff of the yeast. Their life spans were further shortened if the flies actually ate the yeast paste.

Pletcher says the smell of yeast only had an effect on the life spans of dieting flies and not on those that were fully fed and likely already perceived their immediate environment to be nutrient-rich. "If you're in what might be considered an alternative physiological state that is associated with long life span under diet restriction, then the foods have some effect," he says, noting "that suggests that there's some interaction because the odorants aren't having the same effect in all environments."

To determine if smell alone has an effect on longevity, Pletcher's team created a fruit fly strain that had a particularly sensitive olfactory receptor inhibited. Fully fed female flies with an impaired sense of smell exhibited an average life span increase of 56 percent compared with unaltered wild females. Males also lived longer than their wild counterparts. Pletcher says this indicates that odor-mediated aging and dietary effects on aging probably share some of the same physiological pathways.

Brown University ecologist Marc Tatar says the current study, published in this week's Science, provides "really profound evidence" that longevity is controlled not by actual resources but rather by hormones that are cued to resources (such as the way plants sense winter by sunlight changes). "It's like the whole system doesn't actually function on the currency of resources anymore, it all functions on virtual data about what the resources should be like," he says. "It's mind over matter."

Pletcher agrees with that analysis, at least in part. "Some component is due to perception," he says, "and another large component is actually consumption." But given the effect that eating versus smelling yeast had on longevity, he says, "Overall, I would guess consumption has a bigger effect than perception, that's for sure."

RELATED LINKS: Being Cool Could Be the Key to a Longer Life Caloric Restriction and Aging How Low-Cal Diet Lengthens Fruit Fly Life Span Benefits of Diet Can Kick in Late in Life

New particle accelerator could rule out string theory

• 22:04 01 February 2007
• NewScientist.com news service
• David Shiga

String theory could be ruled out by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator scheduled to open by the end of 2007, a new study says. The finding offers a new approach for testing this potential "theory of everything", a goal that has so far proven elusive.

reposted from: New Scientist
my highlights / emphasis / edits

According to string theory, particles like electrons and photons are actually tiny, vibrating strings. The beauty of the theory is that it accounts for all of the known forces – including gravity, which the standard model of physics does not. But its critics have complained that there is essentially no way to test it.

Strong evidence for string theory could come from the observation of short-lived, mini black holes at the LHC (see Watching God play dice: The Large Hadron Collider). But the chance of them appearing is extremely small, so a failure to see them would not be a death blow for the theory.

In 2006, string theorist Allan Adams of MIT in Cambridge, US, and others offered a more promising check. They showed that some particle collisions could reveal whether certain fundamental assumptions underlying string theory are wrong.

Now, another team has shown that the energies needed to reveal such effects are achievable at the LHC, which is being built in Geneva, Switzerland. The team was led by Jacques Distler of the University of Texas in Austin, US.

High energies

One of string theory's assumptions comes from Einstein's theory of relativity – that the speed of light is the same for all observers, a principle called Lorentz invariance.

This principle – and three others underlying string theory – determine how strongly particles called W bosons, which transmit the weak nuclear force, interact.

If these interactions are below the strength calculated by Distler's team, it would signal that one of the assumptions built into string theory is incorrect and that therefore string theory itself is wrong, the researchers say.

"They did a very important thing," Adams told New Scientist.

Quantised space

If string theory does seem to be ruled out, physicists will have to find another theory of everything that can explain the LHC observations. "If we see these violations, people will start working very feverishly on some sort of alternative that will produce these violations," Distler told New Scientist.

That alternative may turn out to be a theory called loop quantum gravity, which posits that space itself is quantised into tiny chunks. Some physicists argue that loop quantum gravity does not satisfy Lorentz invariance. "So that's one possible direction people might go," Distler says.

Although the test could in principle rule out string theory if violations are found, both Distler and Adams suspect that the results will turn out to respect the four assumptions, leaving string theory as a viable candidate for the theory of everything.

Quantum World - Learn more about a weird world in our comprehensive special report.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters (in press)