The science of calorie restriction just got a lot more complicated.

Rhesus monkeys fed experimental low-calorie diets didnt live any longer than their high-calorie brethren, a result that conflicts with a 2009 report of long-lived, extra-low-calorie monkeys.

That had been the first demonstration of extended lifespans in primates, not just lab rodents, and raised hopes of the diet being a dinner-plate fountain of youth. The new findings seem to challenge that notion, though theyre far from conclusive.

More fundamentally, the findings pop the lid on a roiling scientific back-and-forth over calorie restrictions effects and mechanisms, a matter of vigorous contention thats belied by popular notions of the diet as a simple, straightforward longevity hack.

From the beginning, there have been people who were true believers in the effects of calorie restriction in every single species, said Rafa de Cabo, a National Institute on Aging gerontologist and co-author of the new study, published Aug. 29 in Nature. Often attention wasnt paid to data showing that in some cases calorie restriction wasnt good, or didnt produce the effects it should have.

De Cabos experiment started in 1987, right around the time as another, similar experiment at the University of Wisconsin. Both groups wanted to know whether calorie restriction cutting intake by up to 40 percent below whats typically considered healthy would have the same health-protecting, life-prolonging effects in primates that it seemed to have in lab animals.

In 2009, the Wisconsin group reported that CR, as the diet is known, indeed extended their monkeys lifespans. But in the new study, researchers led by de Cabo and fellow NIA gerontologist Julie Mattison report no extension, at least in monkeys who started CR in middle age or late in their lives. (Monkeys who started during infancy arent yet old, so their longevity results wont be known for another decade or so.)

De Cabo and Mattisons CR monkeys, 57 in total, have shown signs of better health, though theyre mixed. For example, males have low cholesterol and blood sugar, but not females. And even across-the-board health improvements would be underwhelming in comparison to calorie restrictions sometimes overwhelming expectations.

What some people were hoping is that CR would extend longevity beyond the normal, that with a good CR diet you would live for 120 years, said gerontologist Steven Austad of the University of Texas, who was not involved in the study. I think these studies show together that diet is not, no matter how you do it, going to get people living to 120.

Austads own work found that CR didnt work on descendants of mice recently caught in the wild, rather than bred from lab-adapted mice that may be so unnatural and intrinsically unhealthy as to give misleading results.

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Experimental Low-Calorie Diet Gets Puzzling Results in Monkeys

A photograph of 27-year-old male rhesus monkeys used in the study. The one on the left had a restricted calorie diet. The one on the right was fed a normal weight diet.

A 23-year study by the National Institute on Aging shows that calorie-restricted rhesus monkeys - which have a similar genetic code, median lifespan and physiology to humans - didn't live any longer than monkeys who ate a heavier diet.

"One thing that's becoming clear is that calorie restriction is not a Holy Grail for extending the life span of everything that walks on earth," lead author Rafael de Cabo, an experimental gerontologist at the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Baltimore, Md., said to the Wall Street Journal.

Previous research has shown that calorie restriction has helped animals including rats, mice, yeast, fruit flies and round worms live 30 to 50 percent longer. In these cases, caloric intake was reduced by 10 to 40 percent compared to other creatures that were allowed to eat as much as they want.

Then, a landmark study published in 2009 from the University of Wisconsin showed that reducing calories in the diet of rhesus monkeys over a 20 year period helped extend their lives. Only 13 percent of the monkeys of a diet died because of age-related instances, compared to 37 percent of the monkeys who could eat whatever they wanted.

In the new study, 121 monkeys split into a group between the ages of 1 to 14 and another group between the ages of 16 to 23 were either fed a normal diet or a diet that was 30 percent fewer calories than their normal diet.

By 2006, the calorie-restricted monkeys had seemingly younger immune systems and were less likely to get heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other diseases of aging. But, at the end of the study, the oldest animals had the same amount of tumors, heart disease and overall decline in health as the group that was allowed to eat more.

The monkeys who had caloric restriction starting in the earlier period of life didn't live longer, with scientists calculating that the probability that they would outlive their peers who had more to eat at .1 percent. The young restricted diet group were also more likely to die of causes not related to aging than the other group. They did have less incidence of cancer, however.

As for the group that started eating fewer calories later in life, they did show lower levels of triglycerides, which have been linked to heart disease risk. But, neither calorie-restricted group lived longer.

Scientists believe several factors allowed the Wisconsin monkeys to live longer, according to a Nature blog post. First, the Wisconsin monkeys had seven times the table sugar - about 28 percent of calories, similar to an average American's diet - than the NIA monkeys. The Wisconsin monkeys that were not calorie restricted were also allowed to eat as much as they wanted to, meaning they could have eaten themselves to death. The NIA monkeys who had the higher caloric diet were eating closer to a normal diet, but were considerably lighter than the Wisconsin monkeys. Also, in the NIA study, the monkeys were from India and China accounting for more genetic variety, where the Wisconsin monkeys were only from India.

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Calorie-restricted diet doesn't help monkeys live longer, study shows

Aug. 29, 2012, 1:42 p.m.

An effective diet entails a balanced intake and plenty of exercise, right?

Not exactly, if you follow the dietary advice of Elizabeth Taylor.

We've heard our fair share of questionable dietary tips - not from least Karl Lagerfeld, who champions the highly dubious nutritional content of Diet Coke as key to slimming down from fashion heavyweight to fashion's dahling.

He's not alone. Who can forget the baby food diet (possibly not you, Jennifer Aniston), or those who are said to order water and Red Bull in place of a meal (we're looking at you, Paris Hilton), or those who favour ADD drug Adderall (Britney Spears, that was once you, we hear)? There are those who have experimented with laxatives and, of course, those who resort to a surgeon's scalpel to shift a few pounds.

Grapefruit diets - la Kylie Minogue may be less terrifying, but watching calories is nothing new. Nietzsche and Henry James were strict weightwatchers, while the Huffington Post reports that Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson were ahead of their time in another way, choosing a vegetarian diet in days when meat was all but obligatory.

Reportedly a proponent if the distinctly unappealing steak-and-peanut butter sandwich, Taylor doled out some eyebrow-raising weight-loss tips, pushing a high saturated fat diet that has well and truly fallen by the wayside with current nutritionists (and anathema, surely, to those who criticise the Atkins diet).

What a difference 23 years makes - along with her take on steak, the Cleopatra actress mixed cottage cheese with sour cream and advised nothing but plain toast for breakfast in her 1987 diet book, Elizabeth Takes Off.

Not that the actress didn't have a good innings - she died in 2011 at the age of 79.

We may be better off taking a leaf from Audrey Hepburn's lifestyle. According to Pamela Keogh's What Would Audrey Do?, she preferred organic produce and the odd plate of pasta, treating herself to a square of dark cooking chocolate in the afternoons. She drank wine, but was partial to the "occasional Scotch", said the Daily Mail.

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Steak and peanut butter: the Liz Taylor diet Save

High fat diet ... famously curvaceous Elizabeth Taylor stars in 1959 film Suddenly Last Summer. Photo: Reutersr

An effective diet entails a balanced intake and plenty of exercise, right?

Not exactly, if you follow the dietary advice of Elizabeth Taylor.

We've heard our fair share of questionable dietary tips - not from least Karl Lagerfeld, who champions the highly dubious nutritional content of Diet Coke as key to slimming down from fashion heavyweight to fashion's dahling.

He's not alone. Who can forget the baby food diet (possibly not you, Jennifer Aniston), or those who are said to order water and Red Bull in place of a meal (we're looking at you, Paris Hilton), or those who favour ADD drug Adderall (Britney Spears, that was once you, we hear)? There are those who have experimented with laxatives and, of course, those who resort to a surgeon's scalpel to shift a few pounds.

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Grapefruit diets - la Kylie Minogue may be less terrifying, but watching calories is nothing new. Nietzsche and Henry James were strict weightwatchers, while the Huffington Post reports that Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson were ahead of their time in another way, choosing a vegetarian diet in days when meat was all but obligatory.

Reportedly a proponent if the distinctly unappealing steak-and-peanut butter sandwich, Taylor doled out some eyebrow-raising weight-loss tips, pushing a high saturated fat diet that has well and truly fallen by the wayside with current nutritionists (and anathema, surely, to those who criticise the Atkins diet).

Audrey Hepburn in 1957. The actress preferred to stay active rather than take any exercise - but seemed to eat worryingly few proteins.

What a difference 23 years makes - along with her take on steak, the Cleopatra actress mixed cottage cheese with sour cream and advised nothing but plain toast for breakfast in her 1987 diet book, Elizabeth Takes Off.

Originally posted here:
Steak and peanut butter: the Liz Taylor diet

Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2012

OSAKA Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto will personally appeal to Diet members to join a new political party he is forming in mid-September and run in the next Lower House election, sources in his local political group said Tuesday.

The formal announcement of the new party is expected to be made at a fundraiser for Hashimoto's Osaka Ishin no Kai (One Osaka) on Sept. 12. A public discussion between Hashimoto and Diet members interested in Osaka Ishin no Kai's platform for the national election, which is expected to be finalized by the end of this week, will take place in Osaka on Sept. 9, immediately following the end of the current Diet session, the sources said.

"We're not going to call on political parties to participate in the public discussion. We want to speak to Diet members individually," Osaka Gov. and Osaka Ishin no Kai Secretary General Ichiro Matsui said Monday.

In addition to halving the number of Lower House seats to 240, the new party platform is expected to call for ending the prefectural system of government and creating a system of between nine and 13 regions with greater autonomy.

Fundamental reform of the tax system, including turning the national consumption tax into a local tax, will be part of the platform. Hashimoto is also expected to support Japan's participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement.

To become a national party, Hashimoto needs the formal participation of five current Diet members. Democratic Party of Japan Lower House member Yorihisa Matsuno and Liberal Democratic Party Lower House member Kenta Matsunami have been in talks with Hashimoto for the past few weeks about forming a new party and are expected to join, and Osaka Ishin no Kai officials are confident they already have five members lined up.

Formal solicitation of potential candidates for the new party is expected to begin following the Sept. 9 meeting. While the majority are expected to come from the Kansai region, Hashimoto aims to attract candidates in other parts of Japan where he and Osaka Ishin no Kai are particularly popular, especially Ehime Prefecture, northern Kyushu, Niigata Prefecture and parts of the Kanto region.

A number of candidates will also come from the political school that Hashimoto established in March. There are 888 students there currently studying the art of political campaigning.

Hashimoto intends to endorse the most promising students in the Lower House election. But many in Osaka Ishin no Kai have long been concerned that selecting only students from the school as its candidates could result in a group of Diet members with no governing experience. In recent weeks, they have been sounding out experienced Diet members about joining the party.

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Hashimoto calls Diet ranks to form party