Say goodbye to pie and maybe you won't die... yet.

A fancy, new study coming out in the journal Science shows that monkeys with a 20-year, reduced calorie diet live longer, healthier lives. From the Los Angeles Times:

In the new study, scientists tracked 76 adult rhesus monkeys from the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center starting in 1989. Half the animals were fed a typical diet of lab chow, and the rest got a version with a higher concentration of vitamins and minerals to make up for the 30% reduction in chow quantity.

Over the course of the study, the monkeys that ate the regular diet were three times more likely to die of an age-related disease than their counterparts on caloric restriction. Fourteen deaths in the control group were attributable to age-related diseases, compared with five such deaths among the animals that ate 30% fewer calories, according to the study.

The rates of cardiovascular disease and pre-cancerous cell growths were twice as high in the control group compared with the reduced-calorie group.

So what does mean for us humans?

When UCLA evolutionary biologist Jay Phelan put mice on caloric restriction, he got the distinct impression that they didn't appreciate it.

"They bit people and were more agitated," he said. In contrast, the mice who ate a normal diet "would just sit around and let you pick them up."

It also isn't clear whether caloric restriction would extend human lives by very much, Phelan said. He has combined results from animal studies with data on men on the Japanese island of Okinawa who ate 17% fewer calories than men in Tokyo. He calculated that reducing intake by 35% would extend the human life span by just two years.

Admittedly, I should eat less and I'm not even overweight. And I'll certainly do almost anything I can to avoid cancer. But a lifetime of denial for a couple extra years? I'll throw you into a plastic bubble for your whole life and that might tack on a few more years beyond that, but who wants to live forever?

The photo up top comes from the study. The svelt monkey on the left is calorie restricted. Yeah, he looks healthy (although I think they cheated a little because he clearly has a better haircut), but he doesn't look any happier than chunky monkey on the right. He's still trapped in a cage, not eating enough of something he probably doesn't want to eat anyway.

I need a cookie.

photo: Jeff Miller / University of Wisconsin-Madison