CR

More on the CR diet in the NY Times (so coincidentally like 4 days after the NYMag one).

I wonder if it's about the obsessive attention to nutrients and vitamins, less than the diet. Slightly overweight people live longer than underweight people and longer than obese people. At any rate it's still interesting and strange.

Despite the initially promising results from studies of primates, some scientists doubt that calorie restriction can ever work effectively in humans. A mathematical model published last year by researchers at University of California, Los Angeles, and University of California, Irvine, predicted that the maximum life span gain from calorie restriction for humans would be just 7 percent. A more likely figure, the authors said, was 2 percent.

“Calorie restriction is doomed to fail, and will make people miserable in the process of attempting it,” said Dr. Jay Phelan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a co-author of the paper. “We do see benefits, but not an increase in life span.”