Monkeying Around With Calorie Restriction

The raw food diet is by far the healthiest diet known to humankind. Yet not all people who consume a raw food diet necessarily wind up living longer than their cooked-food-eating counterparts.

Those who do, however, usually all have one thing in common, even if their diet is not 100 percent raw. And that common element is not forking over large sums of cash for outrageously expensive or exotic supplements. It is quite simple. So simple, in fact, that it is often overlooked. Here’s the essence of it: They all eat very little food. Recent research has verified the age-defying effects of what has come to be known as ‘caloric restriction.’

Caloric restriction is not at all to be confused with starvation or malnutrition. It simply means cutting calories by about 30% over a period of time, enabling the body to become even healthier and more efficient at processing and assimilating the food and nutrients it takes in.

Results of a recently published 20-year experiment done on Rhesus monkeys shows that cutting calories, without sacrificing nutrition, actually slows the aging process. Experiments have been done in the past on worms, flies and rodents which revealed the same results. But given the fact that humans (at least most of them!) are much more biologically similar to Rhesus monkeys, scientists believe the results of this study are even more relevant in determining the anti-aging effects of caloric restriction on humans. Additionally, studies have compared the longevity effects of the slightly sparser Japanese diets to the American diets and reached the same conclusions.