Re: Calorie restriction in humans builds strong muscle and stimulates healthy aging genes

But not getting enough to eat will lead to your starving to death. There's obviously a happy medium between gross obesity and lethal malnutrition. and the low and declining US life expectancies suggest that Americans don't know where it is. "Reducing calorie intake by as little as 12%" isn't exactly the kind of specific advice that could help.

Useful dietary advice probably has to be given to individuals, and based on their individual genomes and personal histories.

Keeping your waistline below 94cm if you are a male or below 80cm if you are female avoids a whole bunch of problems, but - like all broad-brush advice - isn't the whole story.

It's reporting "research" of a sort. It doesn't sound remotely "rigorous" - whatever that might mean in that context.

What it meas to me is that the cohort - whose size you haven't specified - were eating too much to start with. The US obesity statistics mean that this wasn't unexpected. All the waffle abut gene regulation is secondary to this obvious point. Measuring specific mRNA levels to work out if the calorie reduction was helping sounds like a pretentious and expensive over-kill, and American medicine is famous for that.

That's what the authors want the audience to think.

The endpoint was making the paper sound impressive, so that other dimbos would cite it, as you have done here.

That's standard advice. We know that very few people can actually cut back their eating for long enough to reduce their fat gut and keep it reduced, so it's not useful advice. Some new and fairly expensive prescription medicines do work.

You do seem to be projecting you own problems again.

I believe I saw in this group (maybe John Larkin) the quote "hunger is your friend".

They aren't fools, and the mechanisms that regulate our food intake have been evolving for millions of years, and aren't well adapted to times of abundance.

They are not neuroscientists. They just keep track of what sell well, and modify it in ways that they hope will make it sell better, and build on what turns out to work. It's empirical science, but the nervous system isn't only one being explored. And it is irresponsible idiocy. Making your customers obscenely fat so that they die young shrinks your market.

That's stuff that has been known about for most of the century. It's stuff my mother was taught when she did biochemisty in the later 1930's.

That's pretty much what I was saying.

Since what I posted reflected exactly that point of view, it strikes me that I have already had the education you seem to be claiming that I need. When I worked at Haffmans BV on measuring instruments for the brewing industry, I did have a little contact with Wageningen researchers. They are good at exploiting popular science journalist (and Dutch science journalists know a lot more about science than their American equivalents).

It there's an American group that purports to represent the public interest in obesity, there's a fair chance that it was set up by the food industry to spread counter propaganda. If it wasn't. the food industry would infiltrate it to make sure that their interests were properly represented, which is to say to make sure that none of the advice given cut into their market share.