Medicine: From Hunger

Eat less and live longer. The suggestion was repeated last week by a trio of University of Minnesota physiologists—without any prompting from Washington. They’d been at the mice again.

Minnesota’s famed Professor Maurice B. Visscher and two colleagues had suspected for some time that moderate hunger, the usual state of most of the animal kingdom, might be a pretty healthy thing. In their mouse experiments, begun several years ago, they divided 144 newborn female mice into two groups. One group got all it could eat. The second group got two-thirds as many calories as the first (i.e., a full ration of proteins and vitamins, but less carbohydrates and fats). After the first 240 days, 26 of the underfed group of mice were then fed the full diet.

Result: the hungry mice, though smaller than the well-fed mice, were more active, hardier, developed less cancer, generally lived much longer. (None of the well-fed mice lived over a year and a half; some of the underfed lived well over two years.)

Being well-fed had one notable effect: the hungry mice were less fertile than the well-fed. But the tables were turned when the hungry group was switched to a full diet. At an age when the well-fed, senile mice had almost stopped having offspring, the newly fattened mice began to reproduce more rapidly than the well-fed ever had.