Calorie restriction slows aging in most species and lineages tested to date, though the size of the effect on life span diminishes as species life span increases. Calorie restriction produces very similar short-term health benefits in humans and mice, but mice live as much as 40% longer as a result. We certainly do not. The necessary human studies have yet to run, but the consensus in the research community is that five years of additional life expectancy for calorie restricted humans is about as much as could be expected. The beneficial response to calorie restriction isn’t just one mechanism under the hood, though increased autophagy appears to be an outsized contribution. Calorie restriction changes just about everything there is to be measured in cellular metabolism, shifting the behavior of many networks of linked genes and protein interactions. Given these networks, there are a range of other means of provoking some of the same effects. This is true for most aspects of cellular biochemistry: there is never only one way to produce change.

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