Lifeboat Foundation

Some people say that a calorie restriction (CR) diet is difficult to follow. It used to be. But things have changed: Thanks to great work by leading scientists, current approaches to calorie restriction are just as much about cell signaling as about limiting calories.

It is known, for example, that serious long-term CR dramatically lowers insulin levels.¹ Another hormone, with a similar molecular structure, insulin-like growth factor one (IGF-I), shares the same pathway with insulin and is downregulated by CR in animal studies and by calorie restricted humans who do not follow high protein diets.²

And there’s the rub. For if you hope to benefit from calorie restriction and do not pay attention to the special properties of macronutrient intake, individual foods, and food preparation, you may get an unpleasant surprise: excessive stimulation of the insulin/IGF-I pathway. For example, in a study using healthy volunteers, just 50 grams of white potato starch sends glucose and insulin soaring³ to levels associated with increased risk of cancer, heart disease and diabetes.⁴

Back in the 1930s, when the term calorie restriction was first applied to Dr. Clive McCay’s rat and mouse experiments,⁵ it was entirely appropriate because the focus was on calories since he was looking at growth retardation. Of course, little was known about the signals involved in the life-extending effects of the diet. All that changed as scientists discovered important cell-signaling patterns that produce the phenomenal life-transforming effects.⁶

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