Hungry Like a Cold, Lonely Wolf

This past weekend, the Seattle Times ran a piece on a man who is starving himself so he can live a few years longer (we can't seem to find it online, however). The practice is called calorie restriction, and it is based on research suggesting, for reasons still mostly hypothetical, that restricting one's daily diet to at least 2/3 of the recommended calories for your age/weight could lead to an increase in your lifespan.

Today we heard about a group of researchers at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, CA (yes, we're complete dorks and subscribe to science news feeds) whose research suggests that significantly lower-calorie diets might reduce core body temperature slightly, and core temperature might be a factor in extending lifespan. Their research showed longer lifespans in mice with transgenic modifications that lower the rodents' core temps; just a half degree Celsius drop led to a 15% increase in lifespan. But what is a rat's life without the cheese?

Further digging about calorie reduction practices in humans eventually brought us back to yet another Seattle Times article on the subject from 3 years ago. In it, a Microsoft software engineer describes his experiences on a reduced-calorie diet, and we abruptly stopped reading when we reached this little nugget towards the end of the article:

...he's often low on energy. The biggest sacrifice, he says, was giving up mountain biking because it demanded too much energy.

That's game over for Seattlest. Possibly 10 to 15 years tacked onto the end of our lifetime at the expense of those things now that make us most happy? And being tired and cold (the guy has to wear gloves when typing on the computer because his hands don't get enough circulation) the whole time? Now maybe this person didn't love biking as much, but most people who mountain bike feel pretty strongly about it and he did call it "the biggest sacrifice." It also seems that a calorie-restricted person would not be much fun to be around or live with--would those last years (or even the current ones) be spent alone?

This begs the question, people of Seattle: would you give up the one true personal joy you currently have in life, in exchange for living another 15 years longer than you would otherwise?