Longevity Diets: Can Your Food Choices Make You Live Longer?

In 2007, a team of Harvard and Cornell scientists reported findings that humans could live longer just by restricting their calorie intake. But before readers could get too excited about the findings, they followed those promising first few sentences about the possibility of increasing your life span by up to a third with the bad news: In order to live significantly longer, human beings have to reduce their caloric intake by up to 30-40%. Yikes.

Although scientists report that the diet not only makes you live longer, but gives you more quality of life by making you less likely to develop age-related complications like cancer, heart problems and the like, 700 calories a day is way too much to ask of anyone. One caramel frappuccino has more calories than that. It just didn't seem worth it. Which may be why the study quickly found its way out of the public eye.

But, recently, Scientific American reported that restricting your daily caloric intake is not the only way to live longer. A few years ago, testing on mice proved that the calorie restriction could be spread out over a few days. Mice that fasted every other day, without cutting down on calories on the days that they did eat, lived 1.5xs longer than their counterparts that ate every day. That's a little bit better. If I can enjoy my frosty coffee drink on Monday, I may be able to do without it on Tuesday. Maybe.

And now, scientists at Kyoto University have just reported that worms who fasted every third day increased their lifespans by up to 50% and enjoyed a healthier life overall. That doesn't seem like as much sacrifice. But, I don't think that I'd be able to keep that up for the rest of my life. Especially if its going to be 50% longer. But the results are still exciting.

It seems that as human kind progresses, we find out how to extend not only our species' but our individual life spans bit by bit over time. But what does that amount to? I'm probably too young to have a healthy fear of old age related diseases and all of the other by products of the bad decisions that I make today. Or, maybe I just understand that accidents happen. And I know that if I fall down a manhole at 43 my last thoughts will be: I wish I had eaten more pizza.

I don't mean to be morbid, but even if you can increase your chances of living a longer and healthier life barring any accidents, you never really know. And, isn't that sort of the point? That we never know how many days we have on this planet so we should live each and every one to its fullest? What are you really going to do with those extra decades, all that extra time?

My grandfather was an insurance salesman all of his life. He worked in a windowless fluorescent-lit office for more than 8 hours a day for the better part of forty years. You better believe he was glad as hell when retirement came. Even if he was really too old to properly enjoy it.

Do I really want all of those extra years if it means more behind a cubicle? Is quantity or quality what we're looking for? I don't know. Life is good, but it isn't that good. Not good enough for me to want to putter around at 110 contemplating how long my bladder can hold out. I mean, its fine for worms. Sure 18 weeks of life is better than 12. I'm just not sure 120 is better than 80.

What do you think?