A couple of years ago, a Seattle morning radio personality was talking with his very overweight sidekick Joe about the need for Joe to lose weight. When Joe, the father of a little girl, expressed only mild motivation to lose weight, Bob offered an jolting observation that was almost caffeinated enough itself for me to skip my second cup of joe “how many fat people over 80 do you know?” Gulp. Good point.
But going in the other way, about the benefits of being downright skinny, the front page of the paper today had this article about an experiment to test whether the same reduced calorie diet that had proven to extend the lifespan of mice would have a similar result in primates, in this case rhesus monkeys. There’s clearly some debate about the interpretation of the results, and I find it very funny, and a little sad that it’s all but a given that people don’t have the discipline to reduce their caloric intake if it means living a lot longer.
“Few people can keep to a diet with 30 percent fewer calories than usual. So biologists have been looking for drugs that might mimic the effects of caloric restriction, conferring the gain without the pain. One of these drugs is resveratrol, a substance found in red wine, though in quantities too small to have any effect.”
Funny that they are thinking of drugs to simulate reduced caloric intake.
But the thing that struck me about this entire piece was that it seems to be a given that we want people to live longer. Just in the last 150 years years life expectancy has already increased over 40%, and it’s very likely many of us are on a trajectory to see our 100th birthday. And while that changes how long we work and how much health care costs and all the rest of it, making it to 70 and 80 still seems like a pretty good run to me. Just because we figure out how to make people live a lot longer, let’s be thoughtful in looking at whether we should do that just because we can achieve that outcome.
My work is all about outcomes, and I see so many people every day assuming that they should do something because they can – I just hope people can take a step back more often and ask whether they should be doing something, just because they can. The atom bomb is another example of something that once we figured it out, it got used pretty quickly. Let’s be careful with what we do with the results of these experiments.
And besides, I kind of like the idea of an unlimited diet some days . . . (the monkey on the right).
-Ric
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