At the moment I am talking to a lot of my family and friends about life extension. Soon I’ll ask if they can contribute anything at all to the Mprize. If I manage to get the money, whatever it amounts to, I will be sending it off to the Mprize on Christmas. And hopefully, I’ll also be making a big donation too!

This Christmas please consider donating to the MPRIZE because calorie restriction might only give just a couple of decades of extra life.

One of my main reasons for doing calorie restriction is because I want to live a long time and I think that CR is the best way to allow me to reach a time when medicine is able to reverse aging.

I’m pretty confident that I will make it because I am young enough, but there are many out there who haven’t discovered CR yet, or might have only started when they were middle-aged.

Unfortunately, the later you leave it, the less benefit you’ll get from going on a CR diet. I guess I was quite lucky to have discovered it at such a young age and been able to transition to the diet easily.

This is where competitions and other initiatives like Mprize come in!

What is Mprize?

Mprize is a competition where scientists are trying to use the latest knowledge and therapies to extend the lifespan of mice when they are already beyond middle age.

This is very important because many people are trying to use a different approach. They are trying to slow down aging by intervening in metabolism. This is too late for people who are already old, and the results from such experiments can take a long time to see, especially in humans!

If we can find therapies which objectively improve health and reduce the mortality rate of animals (thus extending their lifespan), then we will have found the first real anti-aging therapy.

We have a lot of optimistic people that are projecting major advances in technology to allow us to live a long time, but it’s not so clear that most of the older generation will ever have a chance in making this biotech revolution if things do not get moving as fast as we would like.

That’s why it’s so important to support Mprize and other projects like it. If we are to benefit from this treatment, we have to put everything we can into it and support it in a smart way.

Aubrey De Grey was one of the early proponents of the Mprize, and he’s now since moved onto forming the SENS foundation. This is a non-profit organization which looks at defeating aging by seperating it into categories and systematically dealing with each of the causes of damage and removing it from the body using various technologies.

He’s had some interesting results in recent years, check out his talk at Google below!

Won’t CR be enough?

We know that the human lifespan can vary by a significant amount, take Jeanne Calment for example, she lived to 122! Isn’t that crazy? Imagine living that long, all the things that you’d see in your lifetime.

It would be incredible.

And that is around 40 years more than the average person lived to when she died in the late 1990s. So we know it is possible to reach this age, and CR gives us the best chance of making it to 120 and beyond.

I really believe that CR will work. It is currently the best option we have available to us, whether we like it or not. So in my opinion, I think it’s worth taking the shot and doing it until we have some better data available.

Eating a plant-based diet or even a vegan diet may also help reduce the risk of some diseases, even without doing calorie restriction. So if you’re not ready to limit your calories, you can help yourself by switching over to plant foods instead of processed junk foods.

Now, there are still many doubters in the scientific community, but wasn’t that also true when adult-onset CR didn’t work in rodents for many years until it was done properly? It’s difficult to care for animals and many different things can affect an animal’s lifespan. It can take a few times to get it right.

We only have theories and mathematical models of why CR won’t work in humans, and that’s all they are right now. On our side we have overwhelming evidence that CR has a high probability of working for us, just wait until we have long-term practitioners of calorie restriction reaching 50-80 years old and looking young and healthy.

Conclusion

CR’s anti-aging effects are already becoming apparent in monkeys at the University of Wisconsin. A picture published a while ago shows that the CR Rhesus monkey’s look years younger than their age and even their health is far better than ad lib monkeys.

And we also have a rhesus monkey study being conducted at the NIA, where they are doing a more strict CR protocol, but without any intervention to treat diseases.

We’ll see lots of clues of CR’s anti-aging effect on humans well before we start reaching 100, as many of us are looking and feeling unusually young for our age after doing CR for an extended period of time.

We also have some very interest results from the studies on calorie restriction which were done at WUSTL by Dr. Fontana.

All in all, I’m very hopeful that CR will translate to humans and I’m very happy to be part of the CR community and among those who are striving to live a long life. But MPRIZE and other efforts to bring about longevity research are so important. Yes, CR will give us a few extra years, but in the end, we need real rejuvenation therapies!

Updated and reviewed: February 2019.