THURSDAY, July 9 (Health Day News) -- A new study that found that a lower calorie diet slowed the aging process in monkeys could be the best proof yet that restricted diets might do the same for humans. "The big question in aging research is, 'Will caloric restriction in species closely related to humans slow aging?'" said Richard Weindruch, senior author of a paper appearing in the July 10 issue of Science. This is the first clear demonstration that, in a primate species, we' re inducing a slowdown of the aging process -- showing increased survival, resistance to disease, less brain atrophy and less muscle loss. "This predicts humans would respond similarly," added Weindruch, professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin and an investigator at the Veterans Hospital in Madison. Another expert noted that, despite some highly publicized studies in certain species, the link between restricted eating and longer lifespan has been far from proven. "The idea that dietary restriction extends lifespan in all species is not true. Many strains of rats and mice do not respond. In some strains, it' s actually deleterious," explained Felipe Sierra, director of the biology of aging program at the US National Institute on Aging (NIA), which supported the new study. "The fact that it doesn't work in some mice but it does seem to work in monkeys is surprising and it gives us hope." But there's a larger question: how to change humans' increasingly careless eating habits. "This finding doesn't give me hope that humans are going to go into dietary restriction," added Marianne Grant, a registered dietitian at Texas A&M Health Science Center Coastal Bend Health Education Center in Corpus Christi. According to Felipe Sierra' s idea, we know that  _  .
the restricted diets experiment really had no distinct effect on rats and mice humans are finding new ways to slow down the aging process of all the species the experiment is unnecessary to be carried on because of the response of the mice the experiment confirmed that restricted diets extend lifespan in all species