Carbs vs Fat
The following medical excerpt discusses eating less calories but is a
disguised
endorsement to eat more fat and less carbs to delay the onset of heart
disease.
Max
Low Cal Diet Keeps Heart Young
by Sid Kirchheimer, WebMD Medical News
…”Based on our finding, it appears that if people reduce their current
calorie intake between 20 and 40% — even starting in middle age — they may
delay the development of heart disease or possibly even prevent it,”
professor of genetics Tomas Prolla, PhD, tells WebMD.
That’s because as hearts age, cells shift their source of energy from the
high-energy, slow-burning fat molecules to more low-energy, fast-burning
carbohydrates. This leaves older hearts with less energy that gets burned
quickly to perform the same work, stressing the heart and setting the stage
for heart failure.
But when calories were reduced in mice, the shift in energy sources was seen
less frequently then in mice consuming a normal diet. The calorie-restricted
mice maintained a slow-burning, high-energy source of fuel. “Simply put, we
found that calorie reduction prevented these age-related changes,” Prolla
says. “So it appears that if you eat a low-calorie diet that is nutritionally
balanced, it is likely that the aging process that normally occurs in the
heart will be retarded.”
The findings support the idea that as the body grows old, it is less able to
repair the damage caused by a gradual build-up of toxic by-products also
called “free radicals.” The study found a decrease in the amount of genetic
damage in heart cells in mice that consumed fewer calories.
This new study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, comes as no surprise to Eric Ravussin,
MD, an anti-aging researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at
Louisiana State University. His center is just beginning a similar study on
humans for the National Institute on Aging.
“It seems as though it’s the amount of calories you eat — and not just the
amount of dietary fat — that influences these cell changes in the heart,”
Ravussin tells WebMD. “It has been shown that longer-living animals manage to
live longer when most of their energy comes from fat instead of carbohydrates
— and that occurs with calorie restriction.
“Although there have been no studies on humans that measure these cell
expressions, we do know that calorie restriction seems to play a big role in
longevity,” he adds. “People on Okinawa, who typically consume about consume
about 20% fewer calories than people in mainland Japan, have the world’s
highest percentage of people who live to be 100 years old or older.”