Live Longer: The One Anti-Aging Trick That Works

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080708/sc_livescience/livelongertheoneantiagingtrickthatworks

by zurla • 18 years ago

30 29 18 years ago

news.yahoo.com

edw519• 18 years ago

Eat less? You don't live longer; it just seems longer.

gizmo3• 18 years ago

Your stomach shrinks when you eat less. You can live comfortably and energetically from 1800-2000 kcal per day. Less if you sit on a chair all day.

Bonus: you save money.

ajkirwin2• 18 years ago

It's not how long you live that matters, it's whether you enjoy life.

I'd rather live to 50 and have a wonderful life, than life to 100 and be less happy.

nreece• 18 years ago

Live a happy life till 50 Or live a happy life till 100? Which one would you prefer now?

steveplace• 18 years ago

After reading that article, I'd prefer a hamburger.

ajkirwin2• 18 years ago

I'd never be happy on a calorie restricted diet. And I need all the happiness I can get!

JabavuAdams• 18 years ago

How much less happy? And will you still agree when you're 49?

What if you change your habits sufficiently that after an initial period of (slight) unhappiness, eating less no longer makes you unhappy?

cstejerean• 18 years ago

If you want to increase your lifespan dramatically (like a change from 50 to 100) you need to eat a lot less. You end up eating so little that you literally don't have enough energy to do anything (think < 1000 calories per day).

pg• 18 years ago

I think exercise has also been shown to work.

baha_man• 18 years ago

It's a nice distinction, but perhaps exercise only prevents diseases which kill you 'prematurely':

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080514064921.ht...:

'...these findings indicate that exercise can prevent an early death from disease in some rats, but does not extend the maximal lifespan of any of the rats.'

Alex39172• 18 years ago

From what I've heard, the amount of exercise needed to increase lifespan is so little that you're almost certainly already doing it. If you walk a few blocks once in a while then you're basically set. Vigorous workouts dramatically increase the quality of life in old age, but the actual life expectancy peaks out really fast.

gizmo3• 18 years ago

Not really, as your organs would still have to work to process the extra calories. The fewer calories you process the less wear and tear in your organs.

And if you eat a sandwich after running for an hour you're breaking even calorie-wise, so exercise isn't even so efficient.

gaius• 18 years ago

Not true because a) within reason, using any of the body's systems makes them stronger. That's the point of exercising. And b) effective exercise isn't about burning calories directly, it's about raising your resting metabolic rate.

Harkins• 18 years ago

I misparsed the headline to say that the way to avoid looking older is just to live longer, to have a slower metabolism.

eru• 18 years ago

I even thought of they meant a tautology: Living longer makes you live longer.

ph0rque2• 18 years ago

Now if there was only a pill that took hunger away, so that you could eat the allotted amount and no more...

icey3• 18 years ago

Those pills are out there, in varying shades of legality.

Dexatrim comes to mind. (As does any Pseudoephedrine carrying drug)

ph0rque2• 18 years ago

Which one is the most legal/safest?

Kilimanjaro• 18 years ago

Churchill lived for 90 years fat as a pig and smoking like a crack whore.

I call bullshit and a way to cut food production in half by persuading everybody to eat less.

Stress kills, food doesn't.

sungam• 18 years ago

Caloric restriction is the only non-genetic intervention proven to increase maximal lifespan in mammals. However it may well be that the magnitude of this effect in humans is considerably smaller than in lower mammals because the mechanisms that repair the damage that accumulates as a consequence of normal metabolism are already more optimal. I think the really interesting area is caloric restriction mimetics. These are alluded to in the article and are a class of small molecule compounds that aim to induce the life-extending effect of CR without the need for reducing calories. GSK recently made a 0.75 billion dollar investment in Sirtris pharmaceuticals http://www.sirtrispharma.com/pipeline-candidates.html who are developing a reversatrol derivative so this is far from science fiction.

drewp• 18 years ago

Where are we, on digg.com?! The subject line of this post should have said "eat less" in it. I shouldn't have to go to the article to get those two words.

Live Longer: The One Anti-Aging Trick That Works

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