[ExI] How effective is caloric restriction likely to be in humans?

[Max More]

spike:

>Here's where I am going with this:  I am trying to figure out why CR 
>apparently is somewhat less effective in life extension for modern 
>humans than it is for other mammals.  With those guys the delta

Have you read Aubrey's thoughts on why calorie restriction is 
unlikely to extend human life spans by more than 2 or 3 years? See 
pages 28 to 30 of Ending Aging.

His more detailed argument is in a paper that I haven't found online, 
except for the abstract:

The Unfortunate Influence of the Weather on the Rate of Ageing: Why 
Human Caloric Restriction or Its Emulation May Only Extend Life 
Expectancy by 2-3 Years

http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?doi=10.1159/000082192

Much research interest, and recently even commercial interest, has 
been predicated on the assumption that reasonably closely-related 
species - humans and mice, for example - should, in principle, 
respond to ageing-retarding interventions with an increase in maximum 
lifespan roughly proportional to their control lifespan (that without 
the intervention). Here, it is argued that the best-studied 
life-extending manipulations of mice are examples of a category that 
is highly unlikely to follow this rule, and more likely to exhibit 
only a similar absolute increase in maximum lifespan from one species 
to the next, independent of the species' control lifespan. That 
category - reduction in dietary calories or in the organism's ability 
to metabolize or sense them - is widely recognized to extend lifespan 
as an evolutionary adaptation to transient starvation in the wild, a 
situation which alters the organism's optimal partitioning of 
resources between maintenance and reproduction. What has been 
generally overlooked is that the extent of the evolutionary pressure 
to maintain adaptability to a given duration of starvation varies 
with the frequency of that duration, something which is - certainly 
for terrestrial animals and less directly for others - determined 
principally by the weather. The pattern of starvation that the 
weather imposes is suggested here to be of a sort that will tend to 
cause all terrestrial animals, even those as far apart 
phylogenetically as nematodes and mice, to possess the ability to 
live a similar maximum absolute (rather than proportional) amount 
longer when food is short than when it is plentiful. This 
generalization is strikingly in line with available data, leading 
(given the increasing implausibility of further extending human mean 
but not maximum lifespan in the industrialized world) to the 
biomedically and commercially sobering conclusion that interventions 
which manipulate caloric intake or its sensing are unlikely ever to 
confer more than 2 or 3 years' increase in human mean or maximum 
lifespan at the most.

I though the following link would yield the whole paper, but it seems dead:
http://www.sens.org/node/files/sens/weatherPP.pdf

Max