You mischaracterize calorie restriction with optimal nutrition by calling it starvation, and you mischaracterize the current research situation. The evidence f

You mischaracterize calorie restriction with optimal nutrition by calling it starvation, and you mischaracterize the current research situation. The evidence for it to extend healthy, mean, and maximum life span in a wide range of species is very extensive: mice, flies, nematodes, etc, etc, etc. The primate evidence for life span extension is mixed at this time, partially because the two decades-long studies were poorly designed in hindsight, and the expectation is that it doesn't extend life greatly in humans. Nonetheless, it has enormously impressive short term health effects in we primates [1]. If calorie restriction was a pill rather than a lifestyle, you'd beat a path to the manufacturer's door, as it has far greater positive effects on health for basically healthy people than any presently available medical technology. It is true that there is some concern in the research community over the degree to which laboratory mice are not good reflections of what is being studied. This is not unknown, and it is not unacknowledged. A range of rigorous testing programs aim to do something about past less rigorous results - see for example the NIA Interventions Testing Program [2]. Interestingly it is worthy of note that many past research programs were tainted by inadvertent calorie restriction - the things they tested led to led to lab animals eating less. The effects of calorie restriction on health and life span are many times larger than those produced by most other things under testing. To address your subtext of animal abuse, the only thing worse than running animal studies to advance medicine and life science knowledge is to not run those studies. Even the path to the future in which near all studies are carried out in tissue engineered flesh or simulation, causing no harm to creatures capable of suffering, requires present animal studies. Researchers want that future as it is better on all counts. Further, studies of calorie restriction and longevity are about the most benign of animal studies: these animals are healthier and longer-lived as a result of the restriction. If you want to do something about animal suffering, farming is the place to start, not research, as it accounts for 99.9% of the harms you dislike. [1]: http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html [2]: http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-program-itp http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-pr...