6 replies to this topic

[Guest]

The british Daily Mail (which has admittingly a special reputation of getting things wrong) recently had a look into CR:


http://www.dailymail...ive-longer.html


Now I am confused: am I forbidden to consume any dairy products (I love fat free yoghurts!)? Also I didn't know that there are already millions of people in the US doing CRON, i.e., counting calories and micronutritions to get the benefits in terms of metabolism. At least the CR-society's memebership doesn't reflect this. In addition the article seems to imply that you start CRON by cutting down your calories from 2000 kcal to 1000 kcal at the first day of the diet and you have to watch a list of forbidden foods. I thought the benefits will occur regardless of the composition of the diet and only calories and proper nutritions matter - e.g. avoiding refined carbs is a secondary issue of healthy lifestyle in general?

Damn, those tabloid reports can be pretty confusing

Edited by TFC, 08 May 2010 - 02:10 PM.

[Michael]

The article is projecting from some individual CR practitioners' dietary habits (most of which do have some justification -- but as minor, tweaking side-issues, not components of CR per se) into "The CR Diet," which of course doesn't exist. Your assessment is correct: any diet that leads to sufficient reduction in Caloric intake while maintaining intake of essential nutrients is "a CR diet;" the rest is side issues.

The "millions of people doing CR" bit is likely an exaggeration from the already-extant exaggerations of certain overly-enthusiastic, overzealous representatives of the CR Society, who basically want to claim that anyone who is watching hir energy intake and trying to eat nutritiously is on CR. That's absurd: there are perhaps a thousand people globally who might be doing something at least approximating, and certainly no more than an hundred actually doing proper CR. Fontana, with the fairly enthusiastic interest of the CR society, has recruited 20 subjects doing sufficiently well-designed CR to join his CR Society study (not CALERIE, which is really just a garden variety healthy-weight-loss study tarted up as "CR." ("Surprise! If you're overweight, and you cut down your excess Calorie intake, you get healthier!!")) This is only a minority of actual practitioners -- in addition to documenting your CR practice, you have to take a long weekend off to spend in the hospital at Wash Uni at St. Louis, normally at your own travel expense, and undergo some often arduous testing -- but it's just not credible to claim "hundreds of thousands," and these guys have evidently added a zero.

[Matt]

Yeah I had the dailymail ask to do an interview with me, I never got back to them. I think that I will do media, just not them :-)

[Forever21]

We need more CR dieters who look YOUNG. Everytime I read / watch something in the news, its a 30-40 somethings that look like...well, 30-40 somethings or 60-70 year olds that look like 60-70 year olds. I'd like to see a 40 year old who looks like Matt.

Edited by Forever21, 08 May 2010 - 11:52 PM.

[Matt]

The thing is most people who started CR were middle age... Only a few of us started very young.

[N.T.M.]

The british Daily Mail (which has admittingly a special reputation of getting things wrong) recently had a look into CR:


http://www.dailymail...ive-longer.html


Now I am confused: am I forbidden to consume any dairy products (I love fat free yoghurts!)? Also I didn't know that there are already millions of people in the US doing CRON, i.e., counting calories and micronutritions to get the benefits in terms of metabolism. At least the CR-society's memebership doesn't reflect this. In addition the article seems to imply that you start CRON by cutting down your calories from 2000 kcal to 1000 kcal at the first day of the diet and you have to watch a list of forbidden foods. I thought the benefits will occur regardless of the composition of the diet and only calories and proper nutritions matter - e.g. avoiding refined carbs is a secondary issue of healthy lifestyle in general?

Damn, those tabloid reports can be pretty confusing

As I understand it, it shouldn't be contingent on the type of food you eat. The stressor of caloric deprivation elicits the gene, not some special ingredient.

[JLL]

Oh man, that was one shitty article. The people were clueless, the experts were wrong, the comments are dumb. I probably have to do a rant post about this on my blog.