As one of the go-to people when the media wants to talk about the practice of calorie restriction (CR) for health and longevity, Methuselah Foundation volunteer and blogger April Smith gets her fair share of undeserved snark, vitriol and general rudeness. She recently set up a little essay contest between friends, bloggers and calorie restriction practitioners on the topic of "Why are people so hateful about CR?" It's been a couple of weeks, and now you'll find the winning entries over at April's blog:

I remember what it was like to weigh 25 more pounds than I weigh now and to be unhappy, heaviness causing the sadness as much as the other caused the other, and it seems impossibly sad to watch people your own age go down a totally avoidable path if they just would get straight in their own heads.

Why do I think people are so virulently against CR? In a country where the average American woman is a size 14, even adjusted for vanity sizing, it's an easy target. While CR could easily put on a pious front, it is, these days, the fat that reserve that for themselves.

Watch a taped performance from 25 years ago, one with frequent shots of audience members enjoying the actors. Watch one today. The face of America is changing. It has a double chin and the upper body of a long-former linebacker. And if you're not with the expanding beltline, you're against it.

Calorie restriction is not about weight loss - and yet the elephants in the room aren't going to leave you alone even if you're marching to a different tune. CR is a matter of looking at the compelling decades of scientific backing for eating fewer calories with optimal nutrition in search of a healthy, longer life. But you get thin as a side effect, and those who are engaged in fighting their own battles over fat, size, and a wealth of related issues near and dear to the apes we are at heart will drag you right on in - if you let them.

But CR has nothing to do with any of that. It's about proven health benefits; the only technique you can practice right now to improve healthy longevity that has a meaningful weight of science backing it up.

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Posted by Reason at January 29, 2007 10:06 PM | TrackBack (0)