Cutting Calories for Youth?

At a recent conference at Harvard, I heard a series of talks that left me cold – and hungry. The “Aging and Healthy Lifespan Conference,” focused on the latest molecular and dietary techniques to achieve life extension.
 
The presenters were an impressive team. Cynthia Kenyon, PhD, spoke about magical worms that live at least twice as long as their normal counterparts -- because of a gene mutation. Harvard’s David Sinclair, PhD, talked about his work in discovering that a compound from red wine grape skins increases the lifespan of yeast, roundworms, flies and mice on high fat diets. (Sinclair co-founded a company called Sirtris that is developing synthetic drugs, based on the compound, called resveratrol, to prevent or treat diseases of aging.)
 
What left me frowning was the fact that resveratrol’s fame stems from studies of caloric restriction.