FDA: OK to zap spinach, lettuce with radiation, page 2

reply to post by Zepherian

And yet life expectancies keep going up and up and up! If "they" were trying to poison us and rob us of vital nutrients we need to live healthy and productive lives, wouldn't we see the reverse trend? Now, I agree that people often have poor eating habits, as they often chose convince over healthy food choices and they have absolutely NO idea how to proportion their food. Much of what we eat in bulk is loaded down with fillers and then flavored - or is just flat out disgustingly fattening and filled with high fructose corn syrup. There's one product in particular I remember seeing on the store shelves being bought up by a rather obese family that made me hang my head in shame - Jimmy Deans Sausage and Chocolate Chip Pancakes on a stick w/ extra syrup. w... t... f....

Also, if you want to get technical, living on the edge of starvation might actually be good for your. Studies done on mice show that caloric restriction diets lead to noticeably longer and healthier lifespans. However, CR diets are very dangerous if not carefully planned and stuck to. Implementation of a poor CR diet can actually decrease life expectancy - so it's not recommended to try unless you have the willpower to stick with it and are under the guidance of a healthcare professional. In the near future this won't be an issue as advances in Gene Therapy will allow us to turn off our Fat/Insulin Receptor Gene. This gene was a bonus to humanity back when we were still hunter-gatherers and our food supply was inconsistent. Our bodies held on to every calorie we took in because there was no way of guaranteeing that the next harvest/hunt would be successful. This isn't really needed anymore, and shutting it down will allow the body to use only what it absolutely needs and expel the rest. Studies done in mice have shown that recipients of this gene therapy treatment gain all the benefits of a healthy CR diet while remaining thin and healthy with no apparent side effects - despite being over-fed on a high calorie diet.

Calorie Restriction Diet

Leptin Gene Therapy

Scientific American - Reprogramming Biology
(Has some info on the Fat Insulin Receptor Gene: See Below)

RNA interference (RNAi), which science learned about only in the past several years, can turn specific genes off by blocking the messenger RNA those genes produce. Because viral diseases, cancer and many other types of illness depend on gene expression at some crucial point, RNAi heralds a breakthrough technology. One example of a gene that we would like to turn off is the fat insulin receptor gene, which tells fat cells to hold on to every calorie. When that gene was blocked in the fat cells of mice during a study at the Joslin Diabetes Center, those mice ate a lot but remained thin and healthy. They lived almost 20 percent longer, obtaining the benefit of caloric restriction without the food restriction.1

[edit on 23-8-2008 by Lasheic]