The Benefits of Restricting Food Intake
Chinese people have always known that eating only until 70% full is better for one's health. Animal experiments have also confirmed that caloric restriction can prolong the lifespan of laboratory mice.On August 15, 2016, the journal Nature published a study by Jan Hoeijmakers and colleagues at the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The study used mice that mimic human progeria, and found that caloric restriction slowed the mice's accelerated aging and prevented DNA damage.The study showed that a 30% reduction in food intake could double the remaining lifespan of these mice and inhibit the accelerated aging of a large number of cells. For example, mice on restricted diets had 50% more nerve cells than mice that could eat ad libitum. This research proves that the practice advocated by the ancient Chinese of eating only until 70% full is very scientific.We often think of malnutrition as a bad thing, but in fact moderate under-nutrition is not only not a bad thing—it can actually prolong animal life. Among the many factors affecting lifespan, slightly lower caloric intake is the most critical; only severe malnutrition harms the body.For most modern people, food is not insufficient but excessive. The modern diet has serious problems: too much food of animal origin, and too much sugar and fat. This leaves most of us in a state of nutritional excess, which is why the incidence of cancer, diabetes, and degenerative diseases is so high.Can this state of affairs be reversed? The answer is yes. As long as we stop the excessive intake of high-calorie foods and restrict our diet, our physical condition will improve.Ecologists have found that some heavily polluted rivers lose their ability to self-purify. But once the discharge of pollutants is stopped for a while, the river's self-purification gradually recovers. At first the recovery is slow, but as the microorganisms and algae in the river increase and sunlight penetrates, the recovery speeds up.Human blood vessels are like rivers. When we take in too much food and too rich nutrition, our vessels become clogged, forming all kinds of plaques. These plaques, like garbage in a river, induce inflammatory reactions, carcinogenesis, and other lesions in our bodies. Eating more food than the body can digest turns into energy and plaques stored in the body, becoming pollutants of our own making.Restricting the diet is like stopping the discharge of pollutants into our body; after sustained caloric restriction for a while, the body's self-purification ability recovers. In a sense, this is like opening a door to self-recovery. That is why some chronic conditions in regular fasters resolve without treatment; even for a disease like cancer, taking measures such as regular caloric restriction does more good than harm.So if we contract a major disease such as cancer or diabetes, the first thing to consider should be restricting the diet rather than boosting nutrition. Modern people have lived through a long historical period of hunger and cold, and there have even been several great famines that starved many to death—for example, the 1942 Henan famine starved more than three million people to death. This formed among the people the idea that one needs to take nourishing tonics after falling ill, so that even now we still have the custom of bringing nutritional supplements when visiting a sick relative.But this idea is outdated. We modern people do not lack nutrition; we have an excess of it. Only terminal or end-stage patients, because of multiple-organ failure and inability to absorb nutrients, present as malnourished—but in that case tonics are of little use. Of the patients I have seen, over 90% are in a state of nutritional excess, yet the question they ask me most often is precisely which nutritional supplements they should take.Animals, evolving in nature for hundreds of millions of years, have developed a complete set of self-recovery programs. When our body develops problems from nutritional excess, as long as we stop eating or restrict intake for a while, the body can itself digest this excess nutrition and clear out the garbage within.Taking in too much food speeds up our metabolism, and too fast a metabolism accelerates cell aging. The cells of the human body can divide only about 50 times, and the longest lifespan of each cell generation is only 2.5 years. When the metabolic rate is too fast, cell lifespan shortens and the rate of cell division speeds up, which naturally affects our lifespan.So, as the old saying goes, the amount a person can eat in a lifetime is fixed; eat it all up too early, and our life is at an end. Those who restrict their diet, eating only until 70% full at each meal and eating food of low nutritional value, may not look as ruddy as well-nourished people, yet they live longer; this phenomenon conforms to the laws of nature.