SGU Episode 374

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SGU Episode 374
15th September 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 373                      SGU 375
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
GH: George Hrab
Quote of the Week
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
Edward O. Wilson
Links
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Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

This Day in Skepticism (1:52)

• September 15, 1929: Birthday of physicist Murray Gell-Mann; Alexander Flemming discovers penicillin in 1928

News Items

Sun Myung Moon Dies (11:29)

• Wikipedia: Sun Myung Moon

Company Apologizes for Thalidomide (15:56)

• CBC news: Thalidomide maker apologizes 50 years after drug pulled

Super WiFi (26:53)

• AFP: 'Super Wi-Fi' poised for growth in US, elsewhere

Calorie Restriction and Longevity (35:22)

• Slate: Will Starving Yourself Help You Live Longer?

S: Bob, to move on to another topic, you're going to tell us how your bid for immortality is going.

B: Yeah. Not good.

(laughter)

B: Not good, or you could say it's going great because I'm still alive.

S: So far so good.

B: But yeah, this news item was a bit of a bummer. For years, scientists have found a correlation between severe calorie restriction in certain test animals and longevity, and experiment after experiment kind of bore that out. But recently they did an experiment with monkeys and they saw no correlation between this calorie restriction and their longevity. Now if you're not familiar with calorie restriction, I mean the meaning is kind of obvious but what they did with mice and lab rats is they would cut their calories by say 30%, really bring it down really low, and they all pretty much lived 30 or 40% longer than you would expect, which is pretty amazing and that's not just somebody living to be 85, 95 or 100, that's a major, major increase so everybody got really interested in it. There was also, in 2009 they did an experiment with monkeys that showed that, these are rhesus monkeys, that they recently did, and they showed that these guys also lived longer so it kind of validated this whole thing. So the community got really excited again and this actually led to, there's a small community of people that took these experimental results to heart, and lived their life eating 30% less calories than the rest of us do.

?: And it shows, they're tired all the time, they can't...

S: They're thin, yeah.

B: It's amazingly onerous, I saw interviews with these guys and they look really crazy thin. And one guy said it hurts to sit for a long time because my butt's gone, so it hurts.

R: Could I just point out that the 30% restriction in calories and the 30% increase in lifespan is exactly what Perry said about me, which is that the length of her life will be exactly proportional to the horror of her life.

B: Oh yeah. One of the classic quotes.

J: Because you're vegetarian.

R: Yeah, and that's exactly it. What a horrific life you lead, but it's going to be longer.

(laughter)

J: Well, maybe not.

R: Well yeah. But it's also the old joke about, oh the restaurant's terrible, the food is the worst that I've ever tasted and the portions are so small.

(silence)

R: No, you don't? Nobody? OK.

?: It's funny. We're laughing inside.

GH: We're just so tired.

J: So the end result is they did a study that disproves that calorie restriction could make you live longer.

B: Well yeah, the other thing that I wanted to mention is this is an incredibly onerous thing to do, I couldn't do it, how many people think they could be on the edge of starvation or really hungry every day? I mean it really couldn't be done.

?: OK here's the weird part, I don't want to do it, but I always took comfort knowing that option was out there.

(laguhter)

J: Yeah, yeah me too.

?: It was like if I felt like living longer, I guess I could not eat this.

R: See I didn't like it being out there because it make me feel like, oh I'm going to die and it's my fault, I just love food too much.

PP: This is just a choice, if I'm going to live life without ice cream then screw it.

?: But now it's not even a choice, now it's just like...

B: Now you could just eat ice cream all day.

?: So now I get to eat ice cream and to hell with it, I don't care, yeah this is great.

J: But does this study really take away all the other studies, is it good enough to take it that far?

S: Well the question was always, how well would the mouse data extrapolate to humans? And for longevity studies it's really tricky. So doing it in a primate which is obviously a lot closer to humans than mice, and the fact that it's negative, does not bode well for that effect existing in humans.

B: Well what they did was, they took four groups of rhesus monkeys, they took two groups that were young and two groups that were kind of on the older side, and one of each group

(39:15)

Special Report (46:08)

• Skeptical 12-Step Program with George Hrab

Science or Fiction (56:11)

Item #1: A new study has shown that carbon nanotubes can kill some species of aquatic organisms. Item #2: Studies show waste produced by coal plants is more radioactive than waste generated by their nuclear counterparts. Item #3: Studies show that the death of two men suffering from tick bites are the result of having contracted Rinderpest, a virus once thought eradicated over a decade ago.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:16:30)

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

Edward O. Wilson

References