This is the kind of news that starts my day the wrong way:

My first reaction was to spike my blood pressure over the "scientists have proved" line. Proved? With a freakin' rat study? Fill in your own expletives.

My second reaction was to note that it's a press release from the University of Buffalo, not a news story. The researchers themselves don't seem to be making these claims. And what they found is interesting, even if it isn't particularly useful:

They gave male rats either a typical diet or one with 40 percent fewer calories. The human equivalents would be 2,500 calories for the first group and 1,500 for the second. Then they tested rats at different ages -- roughly equivalent to late middle age in humans, 50 to 70 years old -- for physical fitness, body composition, and markers of chronic inflammation, which is linked to heart disease.

Most interesting to me were the fitness tests they used: grip strength (which is strongly correlated with longevity in humans), muscle tone, endurance, and swimming speed.

As you could guess from the hyperbolic opening paragraph, the calorie-restricted rats were more fit, had less body fat, and lower levels of inflammation.

Which is great, except that there's absolutely no practical application for us. Our food chain produces about 3,800 calories per person per day. The average American consumes about 2,700 calories a day. (I'm pretty sure that means close to 30 percent of the calories we produce go to waste. It's hard to say, though, since the figures come from different studies with entirely different methodologies.)

The lead researcher acknowledges this, and offers a more modest proposal:

So how does someone cut even 8 percent of daily calories? The second link above notes this:

You don't need an advanced degree in nutrition science to see the COMPLETELY FREAKIN' OBVIOUS problem here. Cut the crap out of your diet, exercise, and you'll probably hit a good, healthy weight relative to your genetics. If you need more intervention than that, go with more protein and less carbohydrate. The first data set I used, the one about total calories produced in the U.S., showed that about 13 percent of the calories we have access to come from protein. About 51 percent come from carbohydrates. If you double the protein and cut the carbs in half, good things will happen.

If that's still not enough, go low-carb.

Speaking of which, in my Internet travels this morning I came across an interview low-carb advocate Jimmy Moore did with his arch-nemesis, Dr. Dean Ornish, more than a year ago. Jimmy came up with a list of 20 things the two of them agree on. At least four of the points are related to overconsumption of sugars and highly refined carbohydrates. Several others (such as "America is exporting poor dietary habits to other countries") touch on the same problem.

So maybe we can all get along. All we need to do is focus on the real problems:

• too much sugar
• too many highly refined carbs
• too many added oils, especially soybean oil

On second thought ...

Weekend blog fast

My wireless network died as I was finishing this post. (My McAfee antivirus program does an annoying scan of my entire computer every Friday morning, and every now and then it decides to attack my wireless connection.) I spent a couple hours trying to fix it, but finally gave up and went online the old-fashioned way.

UPDATE: Sometimes I just amaze myself. The wireless modem was unplugged. I wasted two hours trying to diagnose a problem that didn't exist. I guess somebody up there wants me to start drinking early this weekend!