Ersatz calorie restriction

Is living longer worth the price of spending it in perpetual dietary misery?

Janet Raloff poses this exact question on Science News – http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/43015/title/Coming_Ersatz_calorie_restriction

Janet was covering the Experimental Biology meeting in New Orleans.  She picks out a nugget concerning Avacados, which may offer an alternative.  She describes the potential for a dietary supplement that elicits biochemical changes characteristic of calorie restriction — without having to cut any actual calories.

Apparently:

Avocados may hold a key to longer, better health…George Roth of GeroScience in Pylesville, Md., and his colleagues have been mining avocados…for mannoheptulose (MH).

…and considering how much I like avocados, that just can’t be a bad thing…

When fed to mice in fairly concentrated doses (roughly 300 milligrams per kilogram of an animal’s body weight), it improved insulin sensitivity and the clearance of glucose from the blood. Meaning it helped overcome diabetes-like impairments to blood-sugar control. MH supplementation also improved the ability of insulin, a hormone, to get cells throughout the body to do its bidding (and that’s a good thing).

MH revved up the burning of fats in muscle. That’s the opposite of fat deposition and something that these scientists note “would be an expected effect of a calorie restriction mimetic.”

Sweet…