Starving Your Monkey
The latest and greatest study has proven restricted calorie diets lead to longer life spans.
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There is a lot to think about in this NYT article (Dieting Monkeys Offer Hope for Living Longer, by Nicholas Wade, July 9, 2009). “You can have your cake and eat it too” seems like one more invitation to excess and empowers our current over-fed condition. Too much cake has been our undoing in both an economic sense (the credit binge) and in our lack of discipline when it comes to eating.
We all want longevity; that’s pretty much a given. Some of us may attempt the underfeeding route, but choosing emaciation doesn’t seem like such a happy trail; people that starve themselves seem more sick than happy. The tricking of the body is intriguing. The body will think that it is starving (which it is) and decide to shut down some reproductive functions so that the body can survive and reproduce at a later date when the food account is flusher. Good idea, but I know how hard it is to concentrate during the day if I am getting really hungry. Not to mention the fact that I get very cranky. And anything that shifts the body’s focus away from reproduction to tissue maintenance may have some very strange impact on our psyches. Watch for sales of Viagra to sky rocket!
The big question is whether a new “starvation” pill will also fix blood sugar, diabetes, triglyceride and cholesterol levels and heart disease that will come with all the cake we could now enjoy. Would it not be better to revert to the fundamentals of good nutrition and to live health carefully? That would be a diet that is whole grain based, heavily plant biased and light on the animal products. Get plenty of exercise. Simple things like walking more and biking more, especially to work, have been shown to improve the overall health of men. Do these things and you won’t have to worry about body mass index and taking pills. Look for the diet friendly foods and if you don’t cook, make a commitment to cook so that you can control your own diet.
That’s it!
