You may look the way you want by controlling the calories you eat, but a new study concludes all that dieting to keep a healthy weight is not going to pay off by adding years to your life.
The 25-year study in rhesus monkeys, published this week in Nature, suggests that your genetics and what you eat matter more for longevity than a simple calorie count.
The results were surprising. It showed that rhesus monkeys fed a diet with 30 percent fewer calories than the control group did not live unusually longer. They were smaller monkeys, but that was the only difference.
Another study, done in Wisconsin, showed that monkeys who ate more, got fat and unhealthy. But those monkeys ate an unhealthy diet. They did die earlier than the control monkeys.
While they're trying to sort it out, Steven Austad, who studies aging at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, tells NPR.org not to sweat it:
"Don't feel so bad that you can't get yourself to this phenomenally lean, you might say emaciated, body state," says Austad, "because there's not any evidence that that's really going to help you live a lot longer anyway."
The study began at the National Institute on Aging in Maryland in 1987.