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Study claims eating fewer calories is one of the secrets to living a long life
The duration and quality of life depend on several factors – diet, sleep, physical activities, and lifestyle are pivotal.
Previous studies have found that a restricted diet and intermittent fasting have multiple benefits including weight loss, but new research sheds light on the importance of eating less.
Eating fewer calories contributes to longevity
Your regular diet has a huge impact on the length of your life, but scientists have identified another factor that directly affects longevity, which is beyond your control.
But first, let’s look into the benefits of a calorie-restricted diet on mice that were genetically distinct, representing the genetic diversity of the human population.
The scientists assigned different diets to the mice – letting them eat any amount of food freely, one in which they were provided only 60% or 80% of their baseline calories each day and another in which they were not given any food for either one or two consecutive days each week but could eat as much as they wanted on the other days – to see how it affected their life span.
They found that mice with unrestricted diets lived an average of 25 months, those on fasting diets lived for an average of 28 months, those eating 80% of baseline lived for an average of 30 months, and those eating 60% of baseline lived for 34 months.
The mice that ate the least calories lived the longest, which made the researchers believe that eating less added years to life until they identified another factor.
Genes play bigger role in determining your lifespan
Although eating fewer calories helped the mice live longer, researchers found that genetic factors have a greater impact on lifespan than diet.
“Genetically-encoded resilience” was a common factor in mice that died late. They were able to maintain their body weight, body fat percentage, and immune cell health during periods of stress or low food intake. Furthermore, the sample animals that didn’t lose body fat late in life “survived longest.”
If you want to live a long time, there are things you can control within your lifetime such as diet, but really what you want is a very old grandmother, said Gary Churchill, the lead author of the study.
Drawing attention to calorie-restricted diets targeting weight loss, the further added: “While caloric restriction is generally good for lifespan, our data show that losing weight on caloric restriction is actually bad for lifespan.”
“So when we look at human trials of longevity drugs and see that people are losing weight and have better metabolic profiles, it turns out that might not be a good marker of their future lifespan at all,” he continued.
