Low-Calory Diet Helps Monkeys Live Longer

It was found that monkeys fed a low-calory diet live longer than those fed a regular diet.

Photo: Low-Calory Diet Helps Monkeys Live Longer

Low-Calory Diet Helps Monkeys Live Longer

This study is no fluke, as it was 20 years in length and focused on quality of life in monkeys fed either a high-calory diet or a low-calory alternative.

As in humans, it was shown that monkeys who were fed a reduced calory diet had less risk of certain diseases, and a longer life span, dBTechno reports.

"We have been able to show that caloric restriction can slow the aging process in a primate species," Richard Weindruch of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, whose study appears in the journal Science, said in a statement.
"We observed that caloric restriction reduced the risk of developing an age-related disease by a factor of three and increased survival," Weindruch said, Reuters reports.

Scientists said the monkey study is a significant advance in a story that began in 1935, when researchers first discovered that a nutritious but calorie-restricted diet served as a fountain of youth for rodents.

That finding grew into a body of research revealing the beneficial effects of calorie restriction in other species and sparked a search for drugs that would exploit the same biological pathways without requiring people to go on drastic diets. Sirtris, a Cambridge company that Sinclair co-founded and was bought last year by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million, is a leader in these efforts, Boston Globe reports.