Wiki-Walking: Whales through Low Calorie Diets

I began with an idea that whales were sentient and that having something to do with their lifespan (likely falacious, but it's Saturday morning, lemme dream). In researching the average life span of whales, I ended up reading about the maximum life span of animals in general, including humans. Apparently, we've been capped with about a 120 year life cap for thousands of years. Average life span may fluxuate wildly, but the whole game seems to have always been capped at 120.

Part of the process of acquiring the original data involved something called a Cohort study, which sounds a lot more interesting than it actually it.

Research on maximum life span indicated that the only variable which has been shown to impact biological limits is through calorie restriction. It seems that drinking your nutrients in a protein shake instead of consuming them the traditional method has some merit after all. Calorie restriction simply means that you concentrate your nutrients into as few calories as possible; fewer than most of our diets encompass, anyway. Calorie restriction studies suggest that "lifespan is increased for an organism if it can remain lean and if it can avoid any excess accumulation of adipose tissue...", but caution that nutritional intake should not be impacted if such a diet is to be successful.

One of the calorie restricted diets available is the CRON-diet, which, as it turns out, has nothing whatsoever to do with CRON as it pertains to Unix servers, however. I was actually rather hoping there was a diet based on Unix CRON that turned out to be the solution to longevity. We all dream, right? CRON, in this case, stands for Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition.

I then decided to research calories to find out where they prefer to hide. There certainly aren't any in water, non-digestible fibre, minerals or vitamins.

Fat, of course, has the most calories in it, by density. Surprisingly (to me) alcohol has almost as much in it.

Proteins and carbohydrates have about the same amount in them; about half of that in fat or alcohol.

Fruit and sugar both have about the same amount too; slighly more than half that in proteins and carbs.

The good news is that just about everything except watching television and sleeping burns calories, which is the key to getting rid of all the excess produced from the great American diet of fried food (fat) and alcohol. If you can burn an extra 4000 calories more than you eat, you will lose almost exactly a whole 1lb of fat. If, however, you eat an extra 4000 calories more than you need, you will put on 0.3lbs of fat. [source: Wikipedia]