The unfortunate influence of the weather on the rate of aging
A paper by noted aging researcher Aubrey de Grey, The unfortunate influence of the weather on the rate of aging: why human caloric restriction or its emulation may only extend life expectancy by 2-3 years(PDF), argues that calorie restriction may have limited effect on longevity in humans:
What has been generally overlooked is that the extent of the evolutionary pressure to maintain adaptability to a given duration of starvation varies with the frequency of that duration, something which is – certainly for terrestrial animals, and less directly for others – determined principally by the weather. The pattern of starvation that the weather imposes is suggested here to be of a sort that will tend to cause all terrestrial animals, even those as far apart phylogenetically as nematodes and mice, to possess the ability to live a similar maximum absolute (rather than proportional) amount longer when food is short than when it is plentiful. This generalisation is strikingly in line with available data, leading (given the increasing implausibility of further extending human mean but not maximum lifespan in the industrialised world) to the biomedically and commercially sobering conclusion that interventions which manipulate caloric intake or its sensing are unlikely ever to confer more than two or three years’ increase in human mean or maximum lifespan at the most.If true, here's another influence on human biology that's been overlooked: weather.
posted by Dennis Mangan @ 6:57 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
The factors affecting longevity can be identified for large populations. But for individuals, any one factor may be critical whether it is meaningful for anyone else.
My mother is 90 and pleasantly overweight; her sister was rail thin and died at 84 from general system failure... no identifiable cause. My grandmother died at 99 and was rail thin; my friends mother died at 99 and was well over 100 lbs overweight for the 50 years that I knew her.
I can only guess that genetics plays a significant role for individual longevity and may override the effect of many other factors.
Whether weather is a causal factor for longevity or simply a statistically correlated factor is debatable. Much like changes in atmospheric CO2 being a causal factor for global warming or simply correlated with the latter.
CR in humans may have a negligible affect on maximum lifespan, but can have a large effect on how long an individual is likely to live. They are different things.
If CR simply makes you healthier (and there is increasing evidence for this), that means you are not as likely to die. So someone who practices CR may extend their theoretical maximum lifespan by only a year or two, if that, but could actually die considerably later than they would have without it.
I think this is a good reason to practice CR - you probably stand a better chance of surviving to fulfil your maximum theoretical lifespan (whatever it might be) with CR than without it.
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