Researchers at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center ran a 20-year study of adult rhesus monkeys, feeding one group a diet with roughly 30 percent fewer calories than a matched group eating freely.
By the reporting point, counting age-related deaths, 80 percent of the restricted monkeys had survived against 50 percent of controls, and the restricted monkeys had a lower incidence of diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and brain atrophy than monkeys eating without restriction.
Twenty years is a meaningful fraction of a rhesus monkey's roughly 25-to-30-year lifespan, making this one of the longest primate aging studies ever run on a close genetic relative of humans. A separate long-term study at the National Institute on Aging later found no clear survival benefit, and researchers have since argued that differences in diet composition and when restriction began likely explain the gap between the two results.
Read the original study
Colman et al., Science, 2009 · doi.org/10.1126/science.1173635
Decades of less food, fewer age-related deaths.
Source
- Colman, R. J., Anderson, R. M., Johnson, S. C., Kastman, E. K., Kosmatka, K. J., Beasley, T. M., Allison, D. B., Cruzen, C., Simmons, H. A., Kemnitz, J. W., & Weindruch, R. (2009). Caloric restriction delays disease onset and mortality in rhesus monkeys. Science, 325(5937), 201–4. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1173635