All the rage these days in longevity circles is calorie restriction, so this Julian Dibbell/New Yorker article reports on Dibbell’s two-month test on the the ultra-extreme Calorie Restriction Diet — an 1,800 calorie daily diet:

Iíve been starving for the past two months, actually, and thatís precisely what the party is about: My dinner guestsófive successful urban professionals who for years have subsisted on a caloric intake the average sub-Saharan African would find austereóhave been at it much, much longer, and Iíve invited them here to show me how itís done. They are master practitioners of Calorie Restriction, a diet whose central, radical premise is that the less you eat, the longer youíll live. Having taken this diet for a nine-week test drive, Iím hoping now for an up-close glimpse of what it means to go all the way. I want to find out what it looks, feels, and tastes like to commit to the ultimate in dietary trade-offs: a lifetime lived as close to the brink of starvation as your body can stand, in exchange for the promise of a life span longer than any human has ever known.
Seat belts, vaccines, clean tap water, and other modern miracles have dramatically boosted average life expectancies, to be sureóreducing annually the percentage of people who die before reaching the maximum life spanóbut CR alone demonstrably raises the maximum itself. In lab studies going back to the thirties, mice on severely limited diets have consistently lived as much as 50 percent longer than the oldest of their well-fed peersóthe rodent equivalent of a human life stretched past the age of 160. And it isnít just a mouse thing: Yeast cells, spiders, vinegar worms, rhesus monkeysóby now a veritable menagerie of species has been shown to benefit from CRís life-extending effects.

The WSJ chimes in with this article ($), which focuses on a group of scientists who are attempting to mimic calorie restriction’s antiaging effects with medicines. At the same time, this NY Times article reports on a Wisconsin-based research project that indicates that rhesus monkeys on a calorie restricted diet are much healthier than their counterparts that are eating a normal diet. Meanwhile, this NY Times article reports on a researcher’s work that indicates that the 65% or so of Americans who are overweight or obese got that way, in part, because they didnít realize how much they were eating.
After all this, please excuse me while I go get a gelato. ;^)