Liberal Talk Radio

Follow up to the Contrarian’s piece on life-extending calorie-restricted diets.

In today’s NYT, there’s a bit about a study involving rhesus monkeys.

Check out the sample diets offered, one demonstrating a calorie restricted menu of 2000 calories, the other the “average” diet of 3000 calories. The diets were prepared by one Mike Linksvayer.

Now, I don’t know who the venerable Mr. Linksvayer is, but I’m pretty sure he’s one of the militant calorie restrictors noted in the previous NYT article. Or at least he’s someone who likes to torture himself with food. “Fermented soybeans and garlic” for breakfast? Er, Mr. Linksvayer? If that’s all you’re eating, I wonder how you can even get to 2000 calories a day to begin with. It may shock you to know that you can also eat a healthy diet of things like, say, “oatmeal with raisins and almonds” (full disclosure: Matski’s prefered breakfast) and still limit yourself to only 2000 calories a day.

This graphic presents the choice between restricted and non-restricted diets as a stark dichotomy — either you eat fermented soybeans for breakfast and live forever (or, for an extra 80 years or so {{LOOK OUT FOR THE BUS!}}), or, apparently you eat a burger and fries and you get fat and sickly and die.

I usually don’t call out ridiculousness in the Grey Lady, but this is just egregious.