SGU Episode 374
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| SGU Episode 374 |
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| 15th September 2012 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Guests |
GH: George Hrab |
PP: Phil Plait |
| Quote of the Week |
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| SGU Podcast archive |
| 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)
Company Apologizes for Thalidomide (15:56)
Super WiFi (26:53)
Calorie Restriction and Longevity (35:22)
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.
(laughter)
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 of course became the controls and they fed one a very low calorie diet and the other one was a normal diet, and there was no difference.
J: So the normal diet ones, did they feed the rhesus pizzas?
PP: Yeah I was thinking they control with M and M and celery monkeys as well.
GH: I see because it's in the name.
J: It's food. It's food.
R: You realise it's spelled different, it's completely different.
J: Oh so is it, what are you saying Reece's monkeys?
(laughter)
B&S: R-H-E-S rhesus.
R: Rhesus.
PP: He's rhesus negative. It's OK.
E: Sounds about the same.
J: Evan you didn't know that's what. It's rhesus! You just heard it, dude. Come on.
R: Surely everybody knows this.
J: No! Nobody knew it! It's bullshit!
PP: They're outside playing on swings and jungle gyms. They're recess monkeys.
J: Recess monkeys.
(laughter)
E: These monkeys have peanut butter on the inside, Jay.
(laughter)
J: Come on!
PP: I've got more.
R: They're slightly set back from the rest of the monkeys.
J: Recessed monkeys.
PP: Not to be confused with the abscess monkeys.
R: They stop breathing and they got them breathing again, they're resuscitated monkeys.
B: All right, let's get back on track people, this is science, all right? So they ran the experiment and there was no difference in longevity which really sucks, but there were some interesting health benefits, but they were weird because they were inconsistent, for example, the male rhesus monkeys did not, their cholesterol was... well let me see what the hell does it say here? Their cholesterol was lower.
J: (laughs)
(laughter)
B: No no.
PP: I'm not eating.
E: They gave up peanut butter, yeah.
GH: Let me check my... here.
(laughter)
B: Alright then Phil, then why...
R: It's a technical term, George. It's a technical term.
GH: Sorry. Sorry.
J: Elvis Presley.
GH: Lower.
R: That doesn't even make sense.
J: It doesn't matter, he got it. My boy over there.
?: But I didn't laugh because I'm trying to audition for team smart now.
(laughter)
J: Don't you understand that Steve kicks everyone off team smart?
B: So as I was saying, the male monkeys had lower cholesterol but the women... the females...
R: The women monkeys?
B: Jay, I did it!
GH: How do we know they're women monkeys?
R: You look up their skirt!
B: The female monkeys did not have lower cholesterol, so that's kind of odd, they all had a lower caloric intake but why were the males different to the females? I don't know, whatever.
E: Well they have a picture book for that, Bob.
S: It's probably hormonal.
PP: I'm thinking it's because we process the food differently, the energy goes different places.
B: Right. Also there was less cancer overall. (bell sound) What was that?
E: That was the bell.
R: I think someone just died.
J: That was the bell.
(lots of talking over each other)
J: But the obvious thing is of course, there's a lot of health benefits to eating healthy, being overweight at a certain point is really bad, having excess fat is like an organ in your body that produces its own chemicals and stuff like that.
R: But that's not even like, that's on the other...
?: Yeah, this is the same balanced diet that both are having, it's just eating less.
GH: Yeah with most American diets you could cut 30% and be totally fine because American diets are so huge.
R: But I mean if you see the people who are on these calorie restricted, I mean they're not even in the same league, it's like Skeletor. It's not like.
B: Hey, but they're not as unhealthy as you might think.
R: I'm not saying that they're unhealthy, I'm saying that they're not even, to even compare them to people who are overweight and their health issues, I feel like you're talking about completely different things.
?: Do you think out there somewhere was just like, screw it, just give me three whoppers, after reading that? Or do you get so invested that even in the face of, obviously the science is far from settled, but when you read something like that do you just decide like, well I still think I'm right.
R: Well you'd have to wouldn't you because otherwise you would have to be like, wow I've just been in pain for the last 10 years.
J: I Want to shoot a video of the one guy who was like, some dude ran out and ate 20 hamburgers when he read that.
?: But that's not human nature man, whenever we find out contrary evidence for what we've spent 10 years working on something, we rationalise it and be all like, well it's not quite, there are other benefits I'm getting and then they stick to it.
B: And there really are. No there are. They've done studies showing that some of these guys, they have hearts that function like they're 20 years younger. There are definite benefits to doing this. Remember, they're not just slashing their diet willy nilly, they're really, they look at this methodically, it's very nutrient dense, they're getting what they need, these people are doing an amazing amount of research, these people that can withstand this kind of rigour in their diet, they're really vetting this and checking it out and of course a lot of them are disappointed, and I'm sure that most of them are thinking, well the science, the jury is still out on this. Because we had this study in 2009 and that was positive, this one's negative and that really is the big mystery, why was one good and one is showing the opposite, so there's a lot more to do. But see, one thing you mentioned Brian that was interesting, was how you wanted that as a backup, it was nice to know, but one of the things that I kind of hung my hat on with this was that there were a lot of pharmaceutical companies that were looking at alternative ways to induce this response, they were kind of somehow trigger the metabolic pathways to give this kind of reaction, this longevity reaction, without going through the diet and that's what I was hoping they'd find, OK here's a drug that can mimic this effect without having to go crazy with your diet, and that's what I was hoping for but now who knows what's going to happen with that. I hope that they're wrong.
PP: Did they look at any compounding factors? Were half of these monkeys sitting on their ass watching television and the other half out biking?
R: Half were out smoking.
(laughter)
PP: They're drinking... yeah.
GH: Half were podcasting.
PP: Great. I suspect that would have a very important effect.
B: Yeah, I assume that they would try to, that they would make sure that their lifestyles were relatively similar except for the diet.
R: Actually I read this article but it was really briefly just today actually and I did see something about how even in the mice studies there were huge differences in different, not species but different sub-species, is that a word?
S: Breeds?
J: Reecy sub-species.
R: Uh, there was a huge difference in different populations of mice on the same diet, and that they suspect that this could be happening in the rhesus monkey study, that they are comparing two different populations.
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
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