Calorie Restriction

Calorie restriction is in the news.

The recent cover of New York magazine features a scarily thin model, sending a confusing message since the article, ”The Last Supper” is anything but an instruction manual on how to look like Nicole Ritchie. Rather, it’s about the Calorie Restriction Diet, and the people who follow it. And they do so not to disappear and die thin, but to extend their lifespan.

Calorie restriction’s been around a long time, but it seems to have hit a critical media mass this week, with feature articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, both within days of the New York magazine cover story. The Calorie Restriction Society (yup, there is such a thing) must have it’s publicist working overtime.

So what’s this all about anyway? And more importantly, what’s the takeaway?

Read on.

The practitioners of Calorie Restriction believe that if you eat less, you live longer. And there’s some science to back that up. Researchers have long known that cutting the caloric intake of animals by about a third expands their life by 30 to 40 percent. This has been demonstrated in everything from yeast cells to mice to monkeys. In fact, the article in the New York Times showed fascinating photos of two monkeys both around 25 years old, one of which was on the CR diet the other of which ate what “normally”. The difference, even to an eye untrained in what monkeys are supposed to look like at age 25, was dramatic.

The New York Magazine reporter embedded himself in a small group of folks who religiously follow the precepts of the Calorie Restriction Society. The article told of dinner parties where the hostess carefully prepares the meals as if she were doing a chemistry experiment with zero tolerance for error (exactly 1 and ½ leafs of arugla, 2 grams of ricotta). Michael, for example, eats precisely 1,913 calories a day no less no more, 30 percent from fat, 30 percent from protein and 40 percent from carbohydrates. (Barry Sears would be beaming). “Cooking for him is the same elaborate exercise in dietary Sudoku it is for all CR diehards, only more so”, writes the author.

Are these folks weird?

Well, sure. But remember, one man’s obsession is another man’s hobby. The folks in the New York mag article are bright, witty and lusty and seem to love life enough to do whatever it takes to extend it. Sure it seems a bit cultish and I can’t imagine any reason other than pure obsessiveness to measure calories down to the single digits, but that said, there’s something to learn here.

Which is this: we eat too much darn food.

The exact mechanism by which restricting calories extends life isn’t clear, but different theories have been put forth, one of which, interestingly, has to do with the reduction of insulin levels. Regardless of why it happens, it appears pretty clear that blood lipids, and other measures of health like blood pressure, are extraordinary in folks who follow this regimine. And here’s the thing- what they’re calling calorie restriction is really not all that restrictive, unless you compare it to the utterly obscene amount of food that most of us consume daily and consider “normal”. Believe me, you can get by very nicely on 1900 calories a day if you’re a guy, and 1500 a day if you’re a woman. No one- except maybe in America- would confuse that with starvation.

I can’t prove this, but I’ve long believed that the number of calories “recommended” for people of any given age, height and weight, on all the websites and in all the nutrition texts, is just too darn high to begin with by at least 10 percent if not more. Show me a woman who won’t gain weight on 2000 calories a day and I’ll show you either an athlete or a winner of the genetic lottery. I still think the best formula for weight loss- as far as calories are concerned- is to take your ideal weight and multiply it by 10.

So maybe we don’t have to go as far as joining the Calorie Restriction Society, but maybe we could learn something valuable from them. We’ve been so conditioned to excess that we actually- amazingly- describe the feeling of not being able to eat Krispy Kremes as “deprivation”. A little hunger isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. “Most of the world goes to bed a little hungry”, C. Leigh Broadhurst once told me. “It ain’t gonna kill you”.

It also might extend our lives.