Food for thought... <--full length article.
"In the field of anti-aging and longevity research, self-experiments are all the rage. Valter Longo, director of the University of Southern California Longevity Institute, undertakes multiday fasts. Other scientists are dosing themselves with the diabetes drug metformin, believing it may help protect their cells from wear and tear. Charles Brenner, a biochemist, has drunk milk laced with high doses of nicotinamide riboside, a type of vitamin B that might defend against aging."
"Let’s start in the 1930s, when an American nutritionist named Clive McCay designed a low-calorie diet for his lab rats at Cornell that gave them all the nutrients they needed but kept them as thin as supermodels and (presumably) ravenous. ... But he didn’t make it close to 130. Though trim and athletic, he had two strokes and died at 69."
"Nathan Pritikin, one of the foremost champions of low-fat diets, died at 69, nearly the same age as Dr. Robert Atkins, who believed in the opposite regimen."
"It’s the decisions that we make as a collective that matter more than any choice we make on our own. ... When I asked Dr. Brenner about this, he agreed that the decisions that we make collectively might be the most important ones. He emphasized that the point of scientific self-experimentation should not be to live longer but to learn."
"When it comes to staying alive, we’re all in it together."