The big issue of course is: does it work?

I suppose it's too early to tell??

PS: animals don't count.

[Posted by: Berend de Boer at May 30, 2005 7:30 PM]

Discounting animal studies, the human studies back calorie restriction as just about the best currently available thing you can do for your general health and resistance to age-related illness. See the referenced studies on the Longevity Meme calorie restriction page:

http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/calorie_restriction.cfm

The jury is still out on any effects on maximum life span in humans - since we don't have any currently accepted method of determining comparative physical age via biomarker. I know of only one study that has addressed this via data mining and follow up on decades-old lifestyle and health studies, and that was positive. But you can't base anything on one study.

So I'd take the amazing results on general health and run with it - if you get additional years, that's good. If you don't, well, that's why we should all be working hard to support medical research for the next generation of anti-aging therapies. A few years here or there is far from the best that science can do.

[Posted by: Reason at May 30, 2005 7:47 PM]

Hi Reason,

Thanks for the comments.

I actually only saw my book for the first time just last week, and think it turned out well. But to be honest, I would say this might not be a book for most readers of this forum, maybe for friends and family, but otherwise the book might be too introductory. Lisa and I wanted to bring the CR and life-extension message out into the larger world beyond the life-extension community. We sort of gently "bootstrap" people into a life-extension standpoint via lengthy discussions of overweight, risk of type 2 diabetes, and other issues with which the average semi-informed reader might already be familiar. But for most people in the life-extension community, there won't be much that's new. What IS new in the book is an attempt to get people like my parents and their pals interested in CR, and, slowly, in life-extension per se. There, I think the book works well.

I want to write a much more technical book dealing with the more radical life-extension landscape in the future. But that's some ways off. In the meantime, the book that the life-extension community should be keeping an eye out for is Michael Rae's book about SENS. I'm not sure when it's coming out, but I know he's working on it now. That promises to be a book readers of this forum will learn a lot from!

Best,
Brian

--
Brian M. Delaney
President, The Calorie Restriction Society
http://www.calorierestriction.org

[Posted by: Brian Delaney at June 7, 2005 7:56 AM]