Sharply decreasing returns when stopping all together, though

for anyone confused by the unexpected part of the title given the decades of research:

“We hypothesized that telomere loss would be slower among people on caloric restriction,” the study’s senior author Isan Shalev, an associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State, said in a statement.

However, what they found was less black and white. After one year of caloric restriction, the participant’s actually lost their telomeres more rapidly than those on a standard diet. However, after two years, once the participants’ weight had stabilized, they began to lose their telomeres more slowly.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“There are many reasons why caloric restriction may extend human lifespans, and the topic is still being studied,” Waylon Hastings, a postdoctoral researcher at the Tulane School of Medicine who earned his doctorate in biobehavioral health at Penn State, said in a statement.

These caps, called telomeres, become slightly shorter every time the DNA is copied to produce new cells.

Age, stress, illness, diet and genetics can all influence how often our cells replicate, and thus how quickly our telomeres shrink.

To explore these effects, Hastings and colleagues at Penn State collected data from the national CALERIE study—the first randomized clinical trial of calorie restriction in humans.

“We hypothesized that telomere loss would be slower among people on caloric restriction,” the study’s senior author Isan Shalev, an associate professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State, said in a statement.

Further research is required to determine whether an additional year of restricted calories would create a statistical difference in biological aging between the participants.

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