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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the monkey-business dept.

Settling a persistent scientific controversy, a long-awaited report shows that restricting calories does indeed help rhesus monkeys live longer, healthier lives.
...
First, the animals in the two studies had their diets restricted at different ages. Comparative analysis reveals that eating less is beneficial in adult and older primates but is not beneficial for younger animals. This is a major departure from prior studies in rodents, where starting at an earlier age is better in achieving the benefits of a low-calorie diet.

Second, in the old-onset group of monkeys at NIA, the control monkeys ate less than the Wisconsin control group. This lower food intake was associated with improved survival compared to the Wisconsin controls. The previously reported lack of difference in survival between control and restricted groups for older-onset monkeys within NIA emerges as beneficial differences when compared to the UW-Madison data. In this way, it seems that small differences in food intake in primates could meaningfully affect aging and health.

Third, diet composition was substantially different between studies. The NIA monkeys ate naturally sourced foods and the UW-Madison monkeys, part of the colony at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, ate processed food with higher sugar content. The UW-Madison control animals were fatter than the control monkeys at NIA, indicating that at nonrestricted levels of food intake, what is eaten can make a big difference for fat mass and body composition.

The study says nothing about whether the monkeys lived happier lives.


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday January 18 2017, @10:16PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday January 18 2017, @10:16PM (#455734) Journal

    Granny ate like a bird

    Like what sort of bird? A humming bird? [dw.com] :-)

    Quoting from that link:They eat up to twice their weight in nectar every day making them not only the hungriest birds but the hungriest animals outside the insect realm.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:58AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:58AM (#455809)

    No, a 115lb granny who ate like a 4oz blue-jay, without scaling up by a factor of 460.

    I believe the expression "eats like a bird" is in common use throughout the English speaking world, and has been transliterated into many other languages.

    Idiom: eat like a bird

    Eat very little, as in Jan is very thin—she eats like a bird. This simile alludes to the mistaken impression that birds don't eat much (they actually do, relative to their size), and dates from the first half of the 1900s (when granny was born). An antonym is eat like a horse, dating from the early 1700s, and alluding to the tendency of horses to eat whatever food is available. For example, I never have enough food for Ellen—she eats like a horse!

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