Life-extended Strategy for Primates

I am happy to come across a prescription that may extend life article in my morning reading today that calorie restriction and simple lifestyle make primates live very long and vital lives. It is good to learn from scientific researche that aside from direct genetic manipulation, calorie restriction is the only strategy known to extend life consistently in variety of animal species. Other studies also show that calorie restriction can be more effective than exercise at preventing age-related diseases like diabetes, heart problems, Parkinson and cancer, and may slow down the progression rate of Alzheimer’s disease. If restricted calorie diet — eating about 30 percent fewer calories than normal and adequate amounts of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients — can make such a difference for primates, I am sure it will make a difference to us humans as well. Richard Weindruch, a gerontologist at the University of Wisconsin who directs reaserch on the monkeys said that the effects are global and calories restriction has a potential to help us identify anti-aging mechanism throughout the body.There are many recent studies on the inter-connections between the biological processes, genetics, nutrition, lifestyle which might also have impacts on human evolution. Talking about human evolution I also read, with interest an article in the magazine “Healthday” about the finding of Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at the Washington University in St. Louis, that there is scientific evidence that modern humans and neanderthals have interbred about 30,000 years ago during the upper Paleolithic era when neanderthals and modern humans were thought to co-exist. Professor Trinkaus believes that there is now solid evidence that neanderthals and humans co-mingled both socially and sexually, and that they may not even have been all that different. His team’s finding from the research of collection of bones in the Pestera Nuierii cave in Romania is published in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the United States National Acedemics of Sciences.

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