More importantly, deaths are just one of the variables being measured. The diet seems to improve quality of life, not just raw quantity. That's reason enough to be interested in these findings.
Furthermore, the author of this blog seems to doubt the role of Science in publishing these findings. The money they make has no bearing on the results. Other scientists, doing closely related work, reviewed the work in excruciating detail (read the footnotes, not the press releases) and found its clear scientific value. Sure, blame the media for the headlines. But the work, as a status report on the field, is very encouraging.
I think anyone living in a western country has enough data to realize that people eating a western diet tend to be overfed, so the comparison between westerners and Tibetan monks has little to do with monkeys.
From what I've read, humans on caloric restriction diets have to design their diets carefully, to increase the nutritional density of their own food supply. (E.g. http://www.calorierestriction.org/Getting_started)
It beggars belief they have not considered, and painstakingly controlled for, such factors.
If monkeys in one group were more likely to die under anesthesia than monkeys in a different group, I'd suspect that something is going on. (Being unimaginative, I'd exclude the possibility that dying under anesthesia causes a low calorie diet.)
I didn't say that two monkeys constituted statistical significance.
> Hence you may subtract them from the age related deaths.
You can subtract them because they're not statistically significant, but you can't conclude that there isn't something going on, which is what "there's no reason to suppose" means.
Suppose that odds of death due to anesthesia is really low (which it is) but that calorie restriction increased it by 10x (which we don't know either way). 10x a really small number is small enough that this study can't observe the effect because it doesn't kill enough monkeys. And yet, that 10x can easily cause two deaths in one pool while the other has 0.
Anemia?
Wonder if they could've run another test group with a diet halfway between the control and the calorie restricted group.
Replace that with could have been caused by aliens to see how ridiculous that sort of claim is. There is no reason to suppose that dying under anesthesia is related to the diet.
Also your analogy doesn't make any sense. Perhaps if they removed bikers that died in traffic accidents while not riding a bike. And then you could argue 'bikers behave differently in traffic, so perhaps biking was the cause'... yeah, and perhaps we should also take the phase of the moon into account, just to be sure...