Thursday, November 12, 2009

Calorie Restricted Diets Might Be Best Bet To Stop Illness And Halt Aging

By Kirsten Whittaker

Adults, and especially younger people, have one more rationale for reducing the calories you take in each day. If the monkeys from some terribly positive research appearing in Science are any guide, by following calorie prohibited diet plans you'll increase longevity, look younger and stay disease free.

Monkeys, as close as you can get to humans, fed a low calorie diet live longer, have fewer indications of aging and less illness - conditions like cardiovascular disease, brain atrophy and even cancer - according to new fascinating research.

In the twenty-year research, the school of Wisconsin-Madison researchers discovered half of the monkeys permitted to eat as they wished were still alive, while eighty percent of monkeys who ate the same foods but with a 3rd fewer calories have survived.

Other experts think the long lifespan of monkeys ( about 40 years ) means assumptions on longevity and diet can't yet be exprapolated and we want to wait a little bit to be certain.

This pioneering but long-term study started in'89 with 30 rhesus macaques and was intended to have a look at the health results of a calorie-restricted diet.

Previous work from'35 had shown that mice fed a calorie restricted diet lived up to 40% longer - the researchers wanted to work out if the same may be true for primates.

In'94 the research was increased with the addition of 46 additional animals. All of the subjects were adults when they were enrolled, and of the original 76 in the study, 37% of the control monkeys lost their lives to age-implicated causes --% of the animal's fed a prohibited calorie diet died of similar consequences.

The incidence of cancerous growths and coronary disease in the monkeys who ate restricted calorie diet plans was half that of the animals permitted to eat what they preferred.

In reality, the oldest monkey still in the study is control subject Owen, who is twenty-nine, two years older than the average life-span of twenty-seven years in captivity.

One of the more noteworthy findings of the study came in the case of diabetes ( or pre-diabetes ).

This illness was discovered in 42% of the control monkeys who ate as they liked and none of the monkeys on the limited calorie diets.

And when it comes to brain health, the animals who ate a low cal diet were better off here too, according to Sterling Johnson, a neuroscientist and another of the researchers.

The report revealed that the areas of the brain that are tied to short-term memory and problem solving are better preserved in these subjects.

These same brain scan results have been noticed in other research on animals like fish, mice, worms, rodents and spiders. All the gurus can say for sure at the moment is that there are differences in places of the brain that could be related to the subjects diet.

A controlled number of these same kinds of studies have been attempted on humans, and have resulted in fewer signs of cardiovascular aging according to professionals.

More work needs to be done, and researchers who study getting older are divided on what stock to put in this work, but that doesn't suggest there's not a ggod case for following calorie restricted diets to keep your body healthy today and also as you age.

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