I love when I find articles that confirm my personal biases. No deep thinking or cognitive dissonance required, no need to try and refute the conclusions. Life is good.
Anyway, a pair of articles came to my attention this week. The first, from Science News Daily, cites research on worms that concludes that excess sugar can shorten lifespan by 20%. Here’s my fave line from the article:
Kenyon says she read up on low-carb diets and changed her eating habits immediately — cutting out essentially all starches and desserts — after making the initial discovery in worms. The discovery was made several years ago, but had not been reported in a peer-reviewed journal until now.
While this research has only been on worms, the article goes on to answer the obvious question: yes, these insulin regulating mechanisms studied in the worms are an awful lot alike to mammalian, and human mechanisms, so there’s a strong possibility that these findings might apply to mice and men as well as worms.
Yep – the obligatory ‘more research is needed’ line was mentioned, and don’t hold your breath waiting for these to come out – longevity studies, for obvious reasons, take a long time.
The second article might be even worse bad news than the first one: sugar can make your skin wrinkle. In a nutshell:
At blame is a natural process that’s known as glycation, in which the sugar in your bloodstream attaches to proteins to form harmful new molecules called advanced glycation end products (or, appropriately, AGEs for short). The more sugar you eat, the more AGEs you develop. “As AGEs accumulate, they damage adjacent proteins in a domino-like fashion.”
If you continue to read the article, the proteins most vulenrable to attack are the collagens and elastins that keep our skin young-looking.
So maybe the advice is: ditch the skin cream AND the brownies – maybe if you don’t eat one, you won’t need the other.
Low Carb Confidential 
I’ve noticed a trend in research where more recently they’ve begun to move from calorie restriction (CR) to investigating more specifically, dietary restriction. Restricting just carbs or protein.
Interestingly there may be some evidence to practice methionine restriction
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19039676
‘Methionine’ was a new word on me. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it claimed that a dietary reduction extended the lifespan of mice. Hmmm. Interesting stuff.
As to the trend in research, I think it might be because it takes so darn long for research to be approved, then run, that we are just beginning to see the results from a new openness of mind that might might have actually begun years ago. But what do I know?