Significant caloric restriction in humans as a therapeutic strategy carries risks that may outweigh the uncertain benefits for healthspan and lifespan.

“what are the downsides and do those downsides outweigh the uncertainty we have about whether caloric restriction is beneficial and unfortunately I think this is something that not very many people in this field pay attention to right people are you know we all expect if you do a clinical trial of a drug you're going to report Adverse Events and and you're going to look at side effects very rarely do people think about that before they write a book recommending that people should do diet X right even in the clinical trials some of the nutritional clinical trials they don't really carefully monitor Adverse Events and I think it's just again it's a bias in the way we think about interventions we feel like nutritional interventions are by their very nature safe and I think you know certainly for extreme nutritional interventions that's clearly not true so I think we should be thinking about what are the risks associated with significant caloric restriction in people as a therapeutic strategy”