Wednesday 29 September 1999

Pic of the day: "For all the food we cannot eat, we thank Thee, O Lord."

I was up early this morning, and got a fascinating e-mail from an online friend and now fellow journaler, so I took that first before going to work. One need to have ones priorities, and I do try to give my friends right of way, even if they are very remote friends physically. Meanwhile I was also getting hungry, so I ate a small cup of yoghurt (175 ml). We're up to something here.

Arriving in Kristiansand, I bought myself a 1/3 liter of "light" milk. There was this absolutely beautiful cheesecake standing there too. (We're still talking about food, here.) I did not buy it, and walked merrily along with my milk. The reason for this was something I read on the bus. Yes, the quarterly special edition of Scientific American.

An article reminded me of something I had already heard about. Researchers accidentally discovered that rodents would live much longer if starved on fat and sugar. The whole ageing process seems to shift to a lower gear - as if the mice were destined to die after a certain number of calories, no matter what else befell them. A most surprising find. Now, obviously there are limits to this: If you wean them from food altogether, they die like any other starvation victim. But if you feed them the necessary nutritients but only half the calories, they would not just survive but survive younger for longer.

For the last ten years or so, similar experiments have been conducted on rhesus monkeys. These are similar enough to humans that if the same effect is found here, it is a safe bet that the human lifespan can also be markedly longer. There is one small details, though: The rhesus monkeys, being more expressive than rats (at least seen through our eyes) made it abundantly clear that they were not impressed with the size of their rations. In short, they were hungry. All of the time. Before, during and after their meals.

I may be willing to skip a cheesecake between breakfast and lunch, but ... would I go hungry all of the time, year after year, just to increase my maximum lifespan? (There is still the occasional truck that might render the whole thing rather insignificant.)

Now it so happens that some people face this dilemma already. I am among the many lucky people whose weight stabilizes with only a moderate reserve to spare. Though I could do nicely with five or even ten kg less, because I've actually been like that long ago and had no problems with it. I am somewhat confused as to where on my body I may be hiding ten kg of fat. I do have a certain paunch, I think it is called, the male midlife bulge. But hardly ten kg of it. Oh well. The fat is out there, somewhere. But at least my body stabilized after a while.

Not all people are so lucky. In some people, the feedback system does not kick in at all, or not until you are already a shapeless blob of fat. And we're not talking females who to their great surprise grow larger breasts and buttocks than their brothers. On the contrary, we're talking about a runaway fattening that covers virtually the entire body and the intestines too in enormous amounts of fat. These people actually already have the choice that the rest of us are only now reluctantly facing: Is it worth living 50% longer if you live those years in constant, unrelenting hunger?

Intriguingly, it seems that people may fall into three categories, based on their genetic disposition. Superfattening may have been meaningful in parts of the world with very marked seasons. Now it seems that some people do not display this tendency at all, presumably because it was never useful to their ancestors. Other are probably born to it - in particular certain genetic groups that were until recently hunters and gatherers. And then there is a large group in which superfattening is triggered by hunger.

So what shall a poor humanoid do? Swithch to half rations and hope that nothing bad happens and perhaps live till 100? Or just continue to walk half an hour each day and take the stairs at work instead of the lift, perhaps kick out the daily cheesecake and the milkshake at lunch? Or just kick back and enjoy the fleeting mortal life while it lasts?