Spring Chicken Page 21

  Was all this self-deprivation worth it? Dowden thinks so. In the mid-2000s, he volunteered for a study led by Luigi Fontana, a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis who is the leading researcher into caloric restriction in people (and also a practitioner of CR himself).

  Dowden was one of thirty-two members of the CR Society who participated in the study, and just like the Biosphere inmates, the CR practitioners had lower blood pressure, better cholesterol, and much healthier arteries than the controls. This was expected, but they also turned out to be much healthier than a group composed of regular marathon runners. That was surprising. By these measures, Fontana concluded, Don Dowden and his fellow undereaters tested decades younger than their chronological age.

  And the world was all like, Big deal. Just another strange American dietary subculture, along with the vegans and fruitarians and raw-foodists and juicers and all the rest. The rest of us regarded them as floppy dolls, broken sticks, maniacs.

  Canto, left, was on a reduced-calorie diet his whole life; Owen, right, was not. Obviously.

  Courtesy University of Wisconsin Board of Regents.

  Until July 9, 2009, that is. On that day, two very special monkeys made the front page of the New York Times. They were pictured side by side: Canto, age twenty-seven, and Owen, twenty-nine. In monkey terms, this made them the equivalent of senior citizens, but the striking thing was that Owen looked like he could have been Canto’s beer-drinking, dissipated dad. His hair was patchy, his face sagged, and his body was draped in rolls of fat. Canto, on the other hand, sported a thick (if graying) mane, a slender physique, and an alert, lively mien—like a simian Don Dowden.

  The two monkeys were part of a long-running study of dietary restriction and aging, conducted at the University of Wisconsin and spearheaded by Rick Weindruch and Roz Anderson. Since late adolescence—sometime in the late 1980s—researchers had been feeding Canto and a few dozen other unfortunate monkeys about 25 to 30 percent less food than Owen and his well-fed crew. The monkeys were primate stand-ins for humans, close enough to draw conclusions as to whether caloric restriction would really delay aging in people. (An early director of the National Institute on Aging had proposed running the experiment on prison inmates, but his idea was vetoed.)

  The study lasted decades—lifespan studies are nothing if not tedious—but by late 2008, the scientists could report meaningful results. The differences were as striking as the side-by-side photos: The hungry monkeys were far healthier, in terms of basic measures like blood pressure, and had far less incidence of age-related disease, such as diabetes and cancer. As a result they seemed to be living as much as 30 percent longer than their overfed friends.

  In a word: Wow. (And in two: No, thanks.) Regardless, caloric restriction had now burst into the popular consciousness—at last, a cure for aging! The only bad news is that you can’t eat.

  The most striking finding in the Wisconsin monkeys, though, was revealed in brain scans.

  The caloric-restriction monkeys had retained far more gray matter—a novel finding that had not been seen in mice on caloric restriction (or, obviously, in yeast). Like humans, monkeys undergo a long, steady process of brain atrophy as they get older. The underfed monkeys seemed to be protected from this brain aging, however. In particular, they had preserved brain regions responsible for motor control and “executive function,” the part of the brain where we make our important daily decisions (like: salad or cheeseburger?).

  Among scientists who studied CR, the monkey study was considered ultimate proof that eating less would extend lifespan, for everyone, all the time. It had even worked in Labrador retrievers, in a study sponsored by Purina. Of course it would work in people. But then along came the Whole Foods monkeys, and they really screwed things up.

  Two years after Canto and Owen made the front page, a scientist named Rafael de Cabo sat in his office at the National Institute on Aging, in a shiny glass building overlooking Baltimore Harbor, in a state of serious anxiety. He had been combing through data from a second major study of caloric restriction in monkeys, one funded by the NIA, and the conclusion was as shocking as it was inescapable: This time, the “dieting” monkeys had not lived longer. CR was supposed to be a slam dunk, but instead this study had failed, taking millions of federal dollars down the drain and creating an incipient PR nightmare.

  Like the Wisconsin study, the NIH study dated back to the 1980s. “There’s no quick way to do an aging study,” says Roz Anderson of Wisconsin. When the data began rolling in, de Cabo saw not just one problem, but two: Not only were his calorically restricted monkeys not living longer, like they were supposed to, but the NIH “fat” monkeys were also living a long time—just as long as the Wisconsin calorically restricted monkeys. What was that about?

  De Cabo and his coauthors dutifully published their findings in Nature in August 2012, and the headlines were predictable: “Severe Diet Doesn’t Prolong Life, At Least in Monkeys,” declared the Times. Not only did it appear to call into question the whole theory behind CR, it was close to an institutional disaster: The government had just spent roughly $40 million to prove that caloric restriction helped monkeys live longer in Wisconsin, but not in Maryland. But the headlines also masked a much more nuanced—and hopeful—story.

  Even though the “hungry” NIH monkeys didn’t live longer on average than the ones who ate whatever, they actually stayed healthier for longer. They had lower incidences of cardiovascular disease, as well as less diabetes and cancer—and when those ailments did appear, they did so later in life. Also, four of the NIH monkeys lived past the age of forty, making them the longest-lived rhesus monkeys ever. “I think it’s one of our very interesting findings,” says de Cabo. “We can have a dramatic effect on healthspan, without improving survival.”

  A native of Spain, de Cabo is an anomaly in the world of dietary restriction research, for the simple reason that he loves food. In a field dominated by skinny people like Luigi Fontana who weigh their salads, he has the robust physique of a chef; his dream is to one day open a restaurant. He loves a good Rioja, and makes the meanest paella this side of Seville. “I love to cook,” he says. “Would I like to practice caloric restriction? I don’t think so.”

  And in fact, maybe he shouldn’t, anyway: A wealth of good epidemiological data points to the fact that it’s better to be a little bit overweight (i.e., BMI of 25) than to be seriously underweight (BMI below 21), like Don Dowden; the most ardent practitioners of caloric restriction can drop down to BMI of 19, which is considered dangerous. The reason, according to Nir Barzilai and others, is that very skinny people may not have the fat reserves they need to survive an infection, particularly as they get older.

  Perhaps because he is a foodie, de Cabo zeroed in on the main difference between the two studies, which was the animals’ diets. The Wisconsin monkeys had eaten a “purified” monkey chow comprising processed, refined ingredients, while the NIH monkeys had eaten a different formulation made from more natural ingredients and whole foods, including fish meal and grains. The Wisconsin diet allowed researchers to control the nutritional content more precisely. But because the NIA monkeys were eating more natural ingredients, they were taking in more polyphenols and other random compounds that we now know may have health-promoting effects. “There are micronutrients, there are flavonoids, that change depending on the time of year,” de Cabo says.

  There were other differences. The Wisconsin monkeys got their protein from whey (that is, dairy), while the NIH got most of theirs from soy and fish. Because of different feeding regimens, the NIH monkeys ended up eating 5 to 10 percent less than the Wisconsin fatties, which meant that they, too, were on a very slight form of caloric restriction. And while the NIH monkeys got just 5 percent of their calories from sugar, the Wisconsin monkey-chow was packed with more than 30 percent sugar, by calories. “That’s like homemade ice cream,” says Steven Austad. “My guess is [the Wisconsin monkeys] didn’t like the food, and they added all that sugar to
get them to eat it.” (Sort of the way food companies add spoonfuls of sugar to, say, “plain” yogurt.)

  So in effect, the NIH monkeys were dining at Whole Foods, while the Wisconsin monkeys ate at the ballpark—brats, beer, and funnel cakes—every day for more than thirty years. “The NIH monkeys were really on a fish-based Mediterranean diet,” says Luigi Fontana. Put that way, it’s not surprising they had different outcomes. And no surprise, either, that nearly half the Wisconsin monkeys had diabetes or pre-diabetes, just like 25 percent of the U.S. population; by and large, those were the monkeys who had died young. But as Rozalyn Anderson of Wisconsin points out, “Our diet was a lot closer to what people actually eat.”

  For all its flaws, then, the Wisconsin monkey study remains one of the best studies of the effects of a junk-food diet that has ever been done—and, clearly, the less junk food monkeys eat, the better.

  People, too. Nobody has attempted a clinical trial of a fast food diet, but Luigi Ferrucci, the NIA scientist who runs The Blast (and a colleague of de Cabo’s), recently tried an interesting and similar little experiment. In a small unpublished study, Ferrucci fed a hearty fast-food lunch to a couple of dozen volunteers, and then monitored their blood chemistry for the rest of the day. The fast-food eaters had extremely high levels of IL-6, the primary marker for systemic inflammation, for hours longer than a control group who had eaten a healthy meal of greens and salmon. It was as if the fast-food eaters had been physically injured by their food.

  So, clearly, what you eat is as important, or more, than how much. Just as Hippocrates—who said, “Let thy food be thy medicine”—had worked out more than two thousand years ago.

  Which is basically what Don Dowden does: His Cornaro-like diet is limited but far less austere than that of many food-weighing, calorie-obsessed CR devotees. Dinner is a piece of fish and vegetables or a salad (he eats a lot of salads), and he does not deny himself the occasional glass of wine. But he’s flexible: If you invite him to dinner and serve him a steak burrito, he’ll politely and WASPily eat at least half of it.

  For the most part, though, he eats like an NIH monkey: not too much, and nothing processed, only good, real food. He looks forward to his salad lunches and his salmon dinners, as much as any gourmand. In fact, when I visited, he was getting ready to renovate his kitchen. And as I found out, he doesn’t leave a lot left in the bowl. Is his diet responsible for his good health? Who knows; the answer may just as well lie in his genes, particularly those from his great-grandfather, who lived to be ninety-seven years old. But the regime works for him, and it’s not too difficult, so he sticks to it, just like Luigi Cornaro.

  “I bet there are millions of people in America who are basically doing what I’m doing,” he says. “They just don’t say they’re ‘calorically restricting’; they’re ‘on a diet.’ ”

  And with that, he sends me on my way—to the nearest hot, juicy, New England–style grinder sub.

  Chapter 12

  WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU

  I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

  —Woody Allen

  At a little past eleven on a Saturday morning, two middle-aged men strode onto a sandy California beach, took off their shirts, and ran into the breaking waves. This wouldn’t have been all that remarkable, except that this was April in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, and the water temperature hovered somewhere below fifty degrees.

  The air was even colder, with the chilling effect of a stiff onshore breeze and the fact that the sun was hidden behind the usual layer of damp coastal fog. At least the beach wasn’t crowded. One guy played Frisbee with himself, tossing the disk toward the open sea and letting the frigid wind bring it back to him. The lone surfer was snuggled in a thick, toasty neoprene wet suit as he tried to coax a ride out of the two-foot waves. The sensible people were bundled up in hoodies or huddled in windproof tents.

  Not these two idiots. They strutted onto the sand in Hawaiian surf trunks, not minding the stares their pale, cottage-cheesy flesh attracted. The older one, with thinning silver hair, bounded into the surf, chest-breaching two waves before diving into the face of a third with a whoop. The other guy, whose thinning hair was blondish, followed close behind—but then suddenly froze in place, in navel-deep water, where he let out a high-pitched, girlish shriek before his lungs clamped shut and he felt like he couldn’t breathe, and was possibly about to have a heart attack right on the spot.

  He then turned around and started running back out of the water, like a giant sissy.

  That second guy, you might have guessed, was me. The first, fearless one was Todd Becker, a mild-seeming fifty-seven-year-old biochemical engineer who may just be the world’s toughest nerd. Becker loves cold-water swimming and other painful-but-character-building activities, because he follows a school of ancient philosophers known as the Stoics, who believed that suffering breeds strength. All but ignored in the modern Western philosophical canon, the Stoics’ theories have echoes in Eastern religions, notably Buddhism, which teaches calm in the face of struggle.

  Becker uses their teachings as a guidebook for life. He is the leading, and perhaps only, practitioner of what he calls a “hormetic” lifestyle, in which he actively seeks out stressful experiences (like diving into bone-freezing water). It comes from hormesis, an ancient Greek word now used by scientists to describe a certain kind of stress response that has been observed in nature. The basic idea of hormesis is that certain kinds of stress or challenges—even some poisons—can actually elicit beneficial effects in the right doses. “We know that chronic stress in humans is clearly bad for you,” says Gordon Lithgow, who has studied hormesis in C. elegans worms. “But short periods could be beneficial.”

  The phenomenon is observed in all kinds of organisms, from mammals on down to bacteria. The life-extending effects of caloric restriction are likely due to a hormesis-type response. In our own lives, we see it most often when we exercise, particularly lifting weights: The work stresses and even damages our muscle fibers, but thanks to the miracle of hormesis, we repair and rebuild them with new, stronger fibers. Most vaccinations work by the same principle: A small dose of a pathogen stimulates a response that renders us immune to the disease.

  “Stress is strengthening, even essential to life,” Todd had opined on the ride over from Palo Alto, where he lives. “Without it, we’d just dissipate away into nothing.”

  Which explains some of his rather odd daily practices. For example, every day he spends half an hour or more doing eye exercises, which he claims have strengthened his vision so much that he was able to toss out the Coke-bottle spectacles he used to wear. Each morning he wakes up to an ice-cold shower, the cold tap cranked all the way up. He stays in for five minutes, minimum, and claims that this bracing ritual not only jolts him awake (thus reducing his coffee budget) but also burns fat, improves pain tolerance, and boosts immunity. His essay about cold-water showering remains the most popular post on his well-read blog, gettingstronger.org. (Motto: “Train yourself to thrive on stress.”)

  The World’s Toughest Nerd first dabbled with cold showering more than ten years ago, and it quickly became a cornerstone of his hormesis-promoting lifestyle. He swore that it had even helped him with his depression, for physiological as well as psychological reasons. “It makes it easier to cope with other stresses and situations in life,” he told me. Incredibly, he had even convinced his son and daughter, ages nineteen and twenty-two, to try it. To his surprise, they actually liked it, though he’d had less success with his wife, who’d replied, “Absolutely no way!” End of discussion. He did manage to persuade a few friends to join the club, one of whom later remarked, “Cold-water showering is the scariest non-dangerous thing I’ve ever done.”

  Well put. Todd’s other painful-but-non-dangerous activities include short-term fasting—skipping one, and sometimes even two meals—and tough, intense workouts, either running barefoot on trails or climbing in a nearby rock gym, often
on an empty stomach. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t eaten for twenty-two hours, or since lunch the previous day, despite going for a tough postwork run with work colleagues in the Palo Alto hills, training for an upcoming 125-mile relay race. “One thing I really love,” he confessed to me, “is fasted workouts.”

  Awful as that sounds, we’ll see in the next chapter why working out while you’re hungry might actually be a good thing.

  This frigid open-water swim was going to be a rare treat for him, a special luxury that he had generously offered to share with me. His hero is a mad Dutchman named Wim Hof, who holds a Guinness world record for swimming fifty-seven meters under Arctic ice. Like Hof, he had trained himself to withstand cold water for long periods. “The thing about cold-water swimming, or showering, is that the first time you do it is the worst,” he’d said, as we rolled into the parking lot. “And then, the first minute is even worse. But after that, it gets better. It may sound strange, but it’s true.”

  I gave myself thirty seconds, tops. I’m a guy who flinches at the thought of getting into the eighty-degree pool at the Y. A nice, hot shower is often the emotional high point of my day. Also, I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that a cold-water swimmer had recently perished in nearby San Francisco Bay, at the start of the annual Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. He’d died almost instantly, of what race organizers called a “massive cardiac event.” He was forty-six years old, just like me. He probably thought he was fit, like me. And he had been wearing a wet suit. Unlike me.

  We walked down to the beach and laid down our towels and gear. I still had my sweatshirt on, my last cozy security blanket. It felt at least ten degrees colder here than in the parking lot. Todd eyed the sweatshirt. “Now or never,” he said.

  “I’m good right here,” I replied, digging my toes into the warmish sand and trying to forget something he’d said on the ride over: “I think the water is about as cold right now as it ever gets.”