Hmm, what do people think of this quote on Reddit? (from
http://www.reddit.co...primate/c616ybd )
This study is being severely misunderstood and misrepresented. What the study shows is that extreme calorie restriction in monkeys doesn't extend lifespan over that of monkeys with only moderate calorie restriction . This [1] NY Times article is more in-depth.
The control group already had a diet that was calorically restricted, so the test group had a diet that was restricted 30% beyond that. The test group monkeys were starved to the point where they were the monkey equivalent of a 6' tall man weighing between 120 and 133 pounds. We already knew that being extremely skinny is not the healthiest.
Also note that the starved monkeys in this study weren't compared to overweight monkeys. They were compared to normal weight monkeys with less of a calorie restriction, but still a calorie restriction.
The older University of Wisconsin study's result seem to differ primarily because they used a control group of monkeys who were allowed to eat as much as they wanted (no calorie restriction).
The key question is this: how do you "define" calorie restriction? How many rhesus macaque calories is approximately equal to 2000 human calories?
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Also - I'll second the confusion on the females living shorter than the males in both the CR and control groups. Was this observed in the Wisconsin study too? Was it related to 20 of 26 adult-onset females being obtained from the military research facility?
Also, how do the survival curves of Wisconsin-CR monkeys compare with NIH-control and NIH-CR monkeys?
Carbohydrate content was also
notably different; although both diets had 57–61% carbohydrate by
weight, the NIA study diet was comprised primarily of ground wheat
and corn, whereas the WNPRC study diet contained corn starch and
sucrose.
How healthy is this, really? Ground wheat/corn is certainly healthier than corn starch and sucrose, but it still is far from ideal...
Edited by InquilineKea, 04 September 2012 - 12:42 AM.