Calorie Overextended Diet

I've been reading a bit about this Calorie Restricted (CR) Diet in which people eat about 1000 calories a day and actually live healthy lives that are supposedly 50% longer than the lives of the rest of us who eat, you know, sustaining diets of... food. A certain husband with a fear of death is turned on by the idea - I hate it. It seems to me like there's just a few calories difference between these CR people and anorexics. How come you can die of anorexia but live 50% longer of this other type of starvation?

Another thing that really gets me is this "research" involving one starved monkey and one that, uh, ate - and in their dotage, the starved monkey is apparently thriving, while the other one spends its day lazily playing euchre and falling asleep in an easy chair in front of the tv. Here's the picture from the NY Times article and the accompanying caption, "Canto, left, a rhesus monkey, is aging fairly well at 25 on a calorie restriction diet. Owen, though only a year older than Canto, is frail and moves slowly. He eats a normal diet."


Well, this Thanksgiving I've been feeling a little like Owen, indulging in what can only be described as a Calorie Overextended Diet (CO).