There are lots of good reasons to try and follow a healthier diet.

You lose weight, you feel good, but the main reason, to live a longer, happier, more productive life.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Today we look at how to make sense of the disparate results from the four primate studies on caloric restriction and lifespan.

Calary restriction and primates to extend lifespan.

Will it work? There's only one way to find out.

There have been four investigations of calorie restriction and lifespan in non-human

primates.

The first was published in 2003, an analysis of the mortality of a hundred and seventeen

Reese's monkeys followed for about 25 years in a lab, eight of whom had their

Purina monkey chow restricted. The average survival of the restricted monkeys was to 32 years of age

compared to 25 years for the control monkeys.

However, it was more of an observational study since the monkeys weren't randomly assigned.

And although in the abstract they talk about the survival advantage and how the

ad libidim monkeys, or eat all you want monkeys, had more than twice the risk of death, but they acknowledge

deeper into the paper that the difference in death did not reach statistical significance

meaning it may very well have been a fluke.

That was all we had, though, until results started trickling in from the famous pair of studies

that involved randomizing about 200 racist monkeys to caloric restriction or more

normal diets, one out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and another from the National

Institute of Aging. The UW study reported the 30% calorie restrictions

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