notyouravgjoel

I was young (If I had to guess, twelve or thirteen), sitting in the musty-smelling spare room at my grandmother’s house. PBS was showing Scientific American Frontiers [1]. I loved that show. The TV showed a bald headed man with a bushy mustache, and began to tell about this amazing thing he discovered: If you lower the normal calorie intake of mouse while feeding it extremely nutritious food, you can double it’s lifetime. And not just it’s lifetime. It’s healthy, vital years. This extraordinary mouse will spend more time being healthy and vibrant as that of other, more normally fed mice. We then learn that this has worked just not in mice, but in every animal it has been tested on. Yes. Let that sink in.

And then, SAF was over, and I was still my young self, intrigued but unable to do much of anything about it. I really didn’t have any access to the internet at the time, and thus had no easy way to do research.

Fast forward a few years, and I’m sitting on the floor in the Health foods section of the Carnegie Library, looking at books, and my eye catches on “The 120 Year Diet”. I begin to flip. Wow, this is the same guy talking about the same thing, but it has more validation, more proofs, and more evidence.

There is some trouble with the idea, however, and I admit this readily. Calorie restriction has not been proven to work on humans. There are studies going on about rhesus monkeys, and the results seem promising. But who knows? There is nothing sure in life, and so much hand-waving goes on in biology that we humans may not benefit by calorie restriction.

I am going to be starting this. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I believe that it would not, at least, harm me. And at least the advice is sound: who would disagree that a low calorie, high nutrition diet is healthy?

[1] You know what I mean by Scientific American Frontiers: the great show that the Pittsburgh PBS station never played. WHY NOT? Why did I have to go to West Virginia to see shows like Scientific American Frontiers or Nova, and all our PBS ever seems to play are obscure dry British shows and Sesame Street. Hint: People who watch Sesame Street don’t have money. They’re children. The parents who most use Sesame Street (as a babysitter) also don’t have money. And, even if they did have some to spare, why would you believe that they’d feel an altruistic urge to donate to you, PBS? No, because they would be raising their children. Bah.