It is very clear from the ongoing rhesus monkey study that the calorie-restricted animals are much healthier and suffer less age-related frailties than the ad-libs.
How do you measure health, and what do you mean by “very clear”? I think there’s general agreement that CR makes age-related deaths less likely. The concern is that it might do that by making other forms of death more likely. If I’m less likely to develop diabetes but more likely to fall / injure myself when I fall, I’m looking at a careful cost-benefit analysis, not a “woo less diabetes.” In that light, the lack of statistical significance for mortality taking all causes into consideration is significant.
(I was going to comment on the monkeys living easy compared to humans, but it looks like 2⁄3 of the control group that have died have done so for age-related reasons, which is the same estimate I’ve seen for humans.)
Overall, it looks like the monkeys benefit from CR, but with the tiny sample it’s hard to say how much, and without a discussion of their lifestyle / disease burden it’s hard to say how it will generalize to humans living in the wild.
[EDIT]I had not read the full study when I wrote this comment. Now that I have, I am no longer worried about the lack of statistical significance. The study was so small that it couldn’t have reliably detected a hazard the size of smoking. The arrows from this study all point towards CR being better, but they’re very fuzzy arrows, and so we can’t draw any firm conclusions.
How do you measure health, and what do you mean by “very clear”? I think there’s general agreement that CR makes age-related deaths less likely. The concern is that it might do that by making other forms of death more likely. If I’m less likely to develop diabetes but more likely to fall / injure myself when I fall, I’m looking at a careful cost-benefit analysis, not a “woo less diabetes.” In that light, the lack of statistical significance for mortality taking all causes into consideration is significant.
(I was going to comment on the monkeys living easy compared to humans, but it looks like 2⁄3 of the control group that have died have done so for age-related reasons, which is the same estimate I’ve seen for humans.)
Overall, it looks like the monkeys benefit from CR, but with the tiny sample it’s hard to say how much, and without a discussion of their lifestyle / disease burden it’s hard to say how it will generalize to humans living in the wild.
[EDIT]I had not read the full study when I wrote this comment. Now that I have, I am no longer worried about the lack of statistical significance. The study was so small that it couldn’t have reliably detected a hazard the size of smoking. The arrows from this study all point towards CR being better, but they’re very fuzzy arrows, and so we can’t draw any firm conclusions.