Re:The Calorie-Restriction Experiment
by zeynel1 on Wednesday October 14, 2009 @05:54PM
(#882227)
If the subject is losing weight then he/she is getting low calories and the body is burning excess fat. The diet then can be adjusted by trial and error and the subject can find the right diet and the right amount. The golden rule is to eat as much non-processed food as possible. I believe that these professional doctors hyper-complicated the process. Dieters usually hate to count calories.
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Natrius is right. The independent variable in this experiment is calories ingested, not weight loss. They're specifically testing for what happens when you eat fewer calories. On page six, they compare rats that are lean because of exercise with rats that are lean because of calorie restriction. "...only calorie restriction was able to slow down aging and increase maximal life span." Simply having the participants lose weight would not allow as much to be learned about what they are studying. Complex controls are paramount for these human studies.