On a recent episode of the
Oprah show, one of the guests was a 51 year old man with the heart of a
20 year old. He’s been following a calorie restriction plan and
they said he might be one of the first people to reach 120 years old by
following this plan. There have been stories both in the lay press and
scientific press about calorie restriction for years and it has been a
frequent talk show topic on other many other TV shows. However, before
you cut your calories in half in hopes of adding another decade onto
your life, you’d better get the other half of the story they didn’t
talk about on Oprah.
I’ve seen a lot of
strange things in the health field, and although calorie restriction
(CR) is the subject of serious and legitimate scientific study, I
consider CR to be one of those strange things. Of course, that’s
because I choose a different lifestyle – the muscle-friendly Burn The fat, Feed The Muscle lifestyle – but there’s more than one reason why I’m not a CR advocate:
Hunger while dieting is
almost always a challenge. There’s some hunger even with
conservative calorie deficits of 15-20% under maintenance. Prolonged
hunger is one of the biggest reasons people fall off the weight loss
diet wagon because it’s unpleasant and difficult to resist. This
is why pharmaceutical and supplement companies spend millions of
dollars on researching, developing and marketing appetite suppressants.
Yet CR advocates put themselves through 30-50% calorie restriction on a
daily basis as a way of life in the hopes of extending life span or
health.
Practitioners of CR follow a
low-calorie lifestyle, but technically, they are not in a chronic 30%
calorie deficit. That would be impossible. What happens is their
metabolisms get very slow (that’s part of the idea behind CR; if
you slow down your metabolism, you allegedly slow down aging). So a 6
foot tall man who would normally require nearly 3,000 calories to
maintain his weight, might eventually reach an energy balance at only
1800 or 1900 calories. This is not just due to a ‘starvation
mode’ phenomenon, that’s only part of it. It’s
primarily because he loses weight until he is very thin and his smaller
body doesn’t need many calories any more.
Does caloric restriction really extend lifespan?
The biological mechanisms of
lifespan extension through calorie restriction are not fully
understood, but researchers say it may involve alterations in energy
metabolism (as mentioned above), reduced oxidative damage, improvements
in insulin sensitivity, reduction of glycation, modulation of protein
metabolism, downregulation of pro-inflammatory genes and functional
changes in both neuroendocrine and autonomic nervous systems.
Mouse studies on CR go back as
far as 1935 and monkey studies began in the late 1980’s. So far
the results are clear on one thing: caloric restriction does
increase lifespan in rodents and other lower species (yeast, worms and
flies). Studies suggest the life of the laboratory rat is 25% longer
with CR (even longer with aggressive CR). Primate studies are still
underway and humans have been experimenting with CR for some time. In
primates and humans, biomarkers of aging show signs of slower aging
with CR. This makes many proponents talk about this CR as if it were a
sure-thing, already proven through double-blind randomized clinical
human trials.
The truth is, there is NO
direct experimental evidence that you will live longer from practicing
CR. Due to the length of human lifespans, we will not have the
necessary data for at least another generation and perhaps multiple
generations. Even then, it will still be highly speculative whether CR
will extend human life at all and if so how much. We can only estimate.
I’ve seen guesses in the scientific literature ranging from 3 to
13 years, if CR is practiced for an entire adult lifetime.
Jay Phelan, a biologist at
UCLA is skeptical. He says the potential life extension is on the lower
end of that range and the increase is so small that it’s not
worth the semi-starvation:
“There is no current
evidence that lifelong caloric restriction leads to increased lifespan
in primates. It’s certainly tantalizing that things like blood
pressure or heart rate look as though they are a lot healthier and I
believe they are. Whether or not this translates to a significantly
increased lifespan, I don’t know. I predict that it
doesn’t.”
I don’t quibble
qualitatively with their results. Yes, it will increase lifespan, but
it will not increase it by 50% or 60%, it won’t increase it by
20% or 10%, it might increase it by 2%. So if you tell me that I have
to do something horrible for every day of my life for a 2% benefit -
for an extra year of life – I say no thanks.”
Is prolonged caloric restriction unhealthy?
When caloric restriction is
practiced with optimal nutrition (CRON), it is not inherently
unhealthy. Actually, it appears the reverse is true. First, the weight
loss that comes with the low calories produces improvements in the
health markers, as you would expect. Second, the meticulous choice of
food from CRON practitioners, where they pick high nutrient foods and
avoid empty calories means that they are making healthy food choices.
Third, advocates say that the CR itself improves health. I wonder,
however, how much does CR improve health independent of the weight loss
and the optimal nutrition?
By losing fat and maintaining
an ideal body composition (the fat to muscle ratio) and eating high
nutrient density foods, I propose that even at a more normal caloric
intake, you will get very significant health and longevity benefits. I
also propose that gaining muscle in a natural way (no steroids) will
increase your quality of life today and as you get older.
Aside from the fact that we
are not lab rats, the truth is, none of us knows when our day will
come. We could get plucked off this physical plane at any moment and
have no control over how it happens. My belief is that we should make
our lifestyle decisions based on quality of life, not just quantity of
life. That includes our quality of life today as well as our
anticipated quality of life when we are older. Maybe we ought to be
focusing more on “health span” than life span.
Downsides of calorie restriction for life extension
One fact about calorie
restriction that they often don’t mention on these talk shows is
that the benefits of CR decline if you start CR at a later age. This
was discussed in a research paper from the Journal of Nutrition called,
“Starving for life: what animal studies can and cannot tell us
about the use of caloric restriction to prolong human lifespan.”
The author of the paper, John Speakman from the School of Biological
Sciences at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, said that the later
in life you begin to practice CR, the less of an increase in lifespan
you will achieve. Even if the CR proponents are right, if you started
in your late 40’s or mid 50’s for example, the benefit
would be minimal. If you started in your 60’s the effect would be
almost nonexistent. Essentially, you have to “starve for
life” to get the benefits.
While some CR proponents claim
that they aren’t hungry and they cite studies suggesting that
hunger decreases during starvation, Speakman and other researchers say
that hunger remains a big problem during CR – especially in
today’s modern society where we are surrounded with convenience
food and numerous eating cues – and that alone makes CR impractical:
“Neuroendocrine
profiles support the idea that animals under CR are continuously
hungry. The feasibility of restricting intake in humans for many
decades is questionable.”
Let’s suppose for a
moment that CR is totally legit and the claims are true. Many of the
proposed benefits of CR come at the expense of what many of us are
trying to do here: gain and maintain lean body mass. One spokesman for
CR is 6 feet tall and 130 pounds. Another poster boy for CR is 6 foot
tall and 115 lbs. Measurements of rodents under CR not only show large
reductions in skeletal muscle but also bone mass.
I am not suggesting that these
CR practitioners are anorexic, a concern that has been raised about CR
when practiced aggressively. However, they are losing large amounts of
fat-free tissue and that is plainly obvious for all to see when you
look at their bony physiques. I am not imposing my body standards on
others, but 115 to 130 lbs at 6 foot tall is underweight for a man by
any standard. Furthermore, researchers say that at the body mass
indices sustained by most voluntary CR practitioners, we would expect
females to become amenorrheic. “One thing that is completely
incompatible with a CR lifestyle is reproduction” says Speakman.
With that kind of atrophy, I
have to wonder what their quality of life will be like in old age.
While many people struggle with body fat for most of their adult lives,
I’m sure almost everyone knows an elderly person who wrestles
with the opposite problem: they are seriously underweight and they
struggle to eat enough and maintain lean body mass.
My grandmother, before she
passed away, was under 80 lbs. We could not get her to eat. She was
weak and very frail. I have reported many times about the research
showing how most overweight people under estimate calorie intake and
eat more than they think or admit. In elder care homes, the research
has often showed the opposite – the patients over estimate how much
they eat. They swear they are eating enough, but they arent and they
keep losing dangerous amounts of weight. With underweight, atrophied
seniors, weakness means less functionality and lower quality of life
and a fall can mean more than broken bones, it can be life-threatening.
Life extension with more muscle
While there is a commonality
between CRON and the way I recommend eating (high nutrient density, low
calorie density foods), in most regards, CR is the opposite of my
approach. In my Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle program,
we go for a higher energy flux nutrition program, which means that
because we are weight training and doing cardio and leading a very
active lifestyle, we get to eat more. Because we are so active and
well-trained, the eating more does not have a negative effect as it
would on a sedentary person, who might get sick and fat from the
additional calories. We active folks take those calories, burn them for
energy, partition them into lean muscle tissue and we enjoy a faster
metabolism and extremely high quality of life.
As a bodybuilder, CR is not
compatible with my priorities, but hypothetically speaking, if I were
to practice a lower calorie lifestyle, I wouldn’t follow an
aggressive CR approach. I’d probably do as the Okinawans do. They
have a very simple philosophy: hari hachi bu: eat until you are only
80% full. While this does not mean there is a carefully measured 20%
calorie deficit, it’s consistent with what we practice in the Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle
lifestyle for a fat loss phase, and avoiding overeating is certainly a
smart way to avoid obesity and health problems. Incidentally, the
Okinawans eat about 40% less than Americans, and 11% less than they
should, according to standard caloric intake guidelines, and they live
4 years longer than Americans.
If someone is being
“sold” on CR by an enthusiastic CR spokesperson, or simply
curious after watching the latest TV talk show (where they are looking
for controversial stories), it’s important to know that there is
more than one side to the story. If you carefully read the entire body
of research on CR, you will see that the experts are split right down
the middle in their opinions about whether CR will really work. CR for
humans remains highly controversial and there are no guarantees that
this will extend your life.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Baltimore, MD put it this way:
“Because it is
unlikely that an experimental study will ever be designed to address
this question in humans, we respond that “we think we will never
know for sure.” We suggest that debate of this question is
clearly an academic exercise.”
In closing, let me go back to
one of the original questions I was asked: “Can the BFFM food
plan also be thought as a longevity lifestyle, but with more muscle
mass?” Absolutely beautifully said! That’s precisely what Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle is.
I believe that by making
healthy food choices but doing so at a higher level of calorie intake
and expenditure, that we can fend off sarcopenia – the age related
decline in muscle mass that debilitates many seniors – while enjoying a
more muscular physique, greater strength, and a less restrictive
lifestyle. Most gerontologists agree – by making simple lifestyle
changes that include strength training and good nutrition, you can
easily turn back the biological clock 10 years without going hungry.
For more information about Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle, the “longevity lifestyle with more muscle”, visit: www.LoseFatBuildMuscle.com
Train hard and
expect success,
Tom Venuto
Fat Loss Coach
www.LoseFatBuildMuscle.com
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder, certified strength and
conditioning specialist (CSCS) and a certified personal trainer (CPT).
Tom is the author of "Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle" which teaches you
how to get lean without drugs or supplements using methods of the
world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models.
Learn how to get rid of
stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.LoseFatBuildMuscle.com
