'Healthy' woman turns even healthier
BY HARRY JACKSON JR. • harry.jackson@post-dispatch.com > 314-340-8234
Posted:
07/06/2011 9:00 AM
Tracie Gregory Goffe was healthy when she first volunteered to be a test subject for the CALERIE Study at Washington University in 2007.
She ate right, she exercised, her weight was fine.
Now she's healthier. "I just wanted to find a way to do it better," she said. "I already worked out and ran around behind my daughter; and (the family) always tried to eat right."
In the two years she was in the program — as a case study and while being monitored — she lost 17 pounds and her blood pressure, cholesterol and triglycerides hit a healthy level and stayed there.
She began the program at 5 feet 4 and 132 pounds. Now she glides around at 115.
"When I saw the study, I signed up because I wanted to know more about (nutrition) for me and my family."
She liked what she learned so well that she's still doing it.
CALERIE is the Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy. It's a study of the practice and effects of calorie restriction.
Practitioners of calorie restriction reduce their calories by 20 percent to 30 percent. They eat food that's higher in nutrition and lower in calories.
For example, breakfast may be berries and yogurt rather than meat, eggs and toast. Dinner may be 8 ounces of fish or very lean meat and mounds of dark green vegetables. Snacks may be slices of fruit rather than cookies or chips.
Practitioners swear by it. They say it slows down time for the body, lowers the metabolism, reverses the effects of aging and prevents age-onset diseases such as cancer, diabetes, arthritis and cardiovascular disease.
Indeed dedicated practitioners do appear healthier.
But they also say that the long-term effect is to increase the human life span to 120 or 130 years.
Researchers intrigued by the practice found that a problem. Even the oldest adherents were nowhere near 120 or 130 years old.
So around the country, indeed around the world, researchers tested insects, mice, rats, monkeys. The test animals generally lived up to 60 percent longer. And those that died tended to drop dead from old age, not from diseases.
The studies began in 2007 with researchers looking for healthy people, not people who needed weight loss and therapy.
That's why Gregory Goffe is somewhat of a poster child for the study, says Kathleen Obert, counselor with CALERIE Study and a registered dietitian with Washington University.
When the human studies began at three sites around the country, including Washington University, the aim was not to promote weight loss or even deliberately improve health.
They wanted to watch what would happen to people already using calorie restriction, but especially, the effect on healthy people at the onset.
"That's why we selected people who were normal weight or only slightly overweight," Obert said. "We were more interested in looking at gene expression, what's happening in low-weight people that isn't working in overweight people.
"What genes are being turned on, why are people so happy, their vascular system ... what's going on in the person who's not healthy and the person who is."
Gregory Goffe, though, was less concerned about the test tubes, needles and analysis and more drawn to ways to improve the quality of her and her family's nutrition practices.
CALORIE REDUCTION
Almost immediately, she realized it wasn't food reduction; it was calorie reduction.
"We ate more vegetables and fruits," she said. "That helped curb the hunger. We never were big red meat eaters, so eating more chicken and fish wasn't a big change. But the quantity was. "They gave me a food scale" to help calculate calories.
The program gave participants packaged foods for the first month, looking for what they could tolerate; there was no need getting people on eating plans when they wouldn't comply, Obert said.
"Eating the packaged meals the first month was the worst part," Gregory Goffe said.
In the end, she and her family didn't change much, she said.
"We just reduced portions and ate more fruits and vegetables. We already didn't keep snacks around the house; we ate out but we'd look at the restaurant's website for nutrition and calories in their menus.
"And if we overdid it, we'd just make up for it later."
She also learned how to eat, she said, an example being not waiting so long to eat between meals.
Gregory Goffe was in the front end of the study. The study is winding down and results are expected late next year.
But, already, cases such as Gregory Goffe's are showing promise, researchers say.
"We only had a few people not complying," Obert said. "Most people started and stuck with it."
Researchers are finding that people on calorie restriction have younger hearts and their health numbers all improve.
Obert said Washington University and Tufts University are finishing their part of the study. Washington University has 58 people. Another research center is expected to finish by the middle of next year.
Obert said don't look for a diet book from the study.
Calorie restriction probably wouldn't work for people who are very overweight or obese.
"My gut feeling is ... they have other things they want food to do — make them happy, entertain them."
"We had people with healthy attitudes to food," she said.
Source: http://m.stltoday.com/STL/db_272502/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=WedpCrv4
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