In this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=222&topic_id=5464 I'm not posting to criticize you for doing a dupe, I just wanted to point out that the main thrust of the Scientific American article is that there are probably alternatives to the grueling calorie reduction regime. There's a lot of evidence that CR may work by stimulating the production of sirtuins. I personally felt that the article makes a convincing argument that this is the case. But no one should take my word for it, everyone should read the article and decide for yourselves.
There apparently are, as the article points out, other ways to stimulate sirtuin production. One of the most potent is resveratrol, a small molecule found in red wine and other botanical sources. Animals fed resveratrol (but not calorie restricted) experience the same health and longevity effects as those on calorie restriction, without the negatives of extreme weight loss and repression of reproductive activities. The article has more details on this.
After reading the article, I did some research and purchased what I
think is a good quality resveratrol supplement. I feel that a supplement is needed for the maximum benefit since obtaining a similar amount of resveratrol from red wine would probably require the consumption of unhealthy amounts of alcohol. I wanted to be careful in my supplement choice since resveratrol can degrade quickly without special precautions in manufacturing and distribution. Since I've been taking the resveratrol supplement my body temperature has dropped a couple of degrees. It was as low as 96.1 Fahrenheit one morning. This is supposedly used as an indicator that calorie reduction is working and is supposedly an indication of increased sirtuin production and possibly decreased metabolism. Of course, I'm not doing calorie reduction (I've actually been eating quite heartily the last few days) so this has interesting implications.
I DO NOT recommended that anyone experiment on themselves in this manner. Do your own research - Google is your friend, as is pubmed.com - then decide for yourself what you want to do. We're all at different stages in our lives and have various personal health situations so we all have to decide for ourselves whether in our individual case it is more prudent to start experimenting now, or better to wait a number of years for the results of more scientific studies.
I personally haven't decided for sure yet whether or not I will continue supplementation.