Adults, and especially younger people, have yet another rationale for cutting the calories you take in per day. If the test monkey from some terribly positive research appearing in Science are any guide, by following calorie prohibited diets you’ll increase longevity, look younger and stay illness free.
Monkeys, as close as you can get to humans, fed a low cal diet live longer, have less appearances of aging and less disease - conditions like cardiovascular disease, brain atrophy and even cancer - according to new fascinating research.
during the 20-year study, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers discovered 50% of the monkeys permitted to eat as they wished were still alive, while 80% of monkeys who ate the same foods but with a third less calories have survived.
Other professionals believe the long life-span of monkeys ( about 40 years ) means assumptions on longevity and diet can’t yet be drawn and we want to wait a while to be certain.
This pioneering but long-term study started in 1989 with 30 rhesus macaques and was meant to take a look at the health results of a low cal diet.
Earlier work from 1935 had shown that mice fed a low cal diet lived up to 40% longer - the researchers wanted to determine if the same might be true for apes.
In 1994 the study was increased with the addition of 46 extra animals. All of the subjects were adults when they were enrolled, and of the first 76 in the study, 37% of the control monkeys lost their lives to age related causes - 13% of the animal’s fed a prohibited calorie diet died of similar consequences.
The incidence of cancerous tumors and heart disease in the monkeys who ate restricted calorie diet plans was half that of the animals permitted to eat what they preferred.
Actually, the oldest monkey still in the study is control subject Owen, who is 29, two years older than the average life-span of twenty-seven years in captivity.
One of the more noteworthy discoveries of the research came in the case of diabetes ( or pre-diabetes ).
This condition was found in 42% of the control monkeys who consumed as they liked and none of the monkeys on the prohibited calorie diet.
And when it comes to mental health, the animals who consumed a calorie-restricted diet were better off here too, according to Sterling Johnson, a brain specialist and another of the researchers.
The report revealed the part of the brain that are tied to short-term memory and problem solving are better saved in these subjects.
These same brain scan results have been seen in other research on animals like fish, mice, worms, rodents and spiders. All the experts can say for sure at the moment is that there are differences in areas of the brain that might be related to what a subject ate.
A controlled amount of these same types of studies have been tried on humans, and have resulted in fewer signs of heart aging according to professionals.
Additional Research must be done, and researchers who study aging are divided on what stock to put in this work, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a ggod case for following calorie restricted diets to keep your body healthy today and also as you age.
Next - just head on over to the Daily Health Bulletin for more information on how calorie-restricted diets mean living longer. Click here for more details on this calorie-restricted diets study.