Before swallowing this theory, I would suggest you read Gary Taubes book, GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES. It is a history of the medical treatment of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity with a full discussion on all the low calorie diet tests. I believe the report is leaving something out of the equation.
Think about it. If a person is put on a semi-starvation diet, wouldn’t the body natural defenses be to put what energy it does have into cognitive abilities so as to help rectify the situation? That may initially slow the progress of certain diseases, but that isn’t a cure since the person is actually slowly starving to death!
>>>Think about it. If a person is put on a semi-starvation diet, wouldn’t the body natural defenses be to put what energy it does have into cognitive abilities so as to help rectify the situation?
That’s where my mind went with the premise of this study. Sharpening the senses to end the famine.
“Think about it. If a person is put on a semi-starvation diet, wouldn’t the body natural defenses be to put what energy it does have into cognitive abilities so as to help rectify the situation? That may initially slow the progress of certain diseases, but that isn’t a cure since the person is actually slowly starving to death!”
This was my first thought. Evolution-schmevolution aside, when a creature gets hungry, its level of cunning goes up as a means to finding more food. There won’t be a cure for many of the extant conditions until there is more money in that cure than can be found in treatment/prolonging that condition.
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If the person is an overweight type 2 diabetic, that's unlikely. Enter Feinman RD, Volek JS into the query box at PubMed. They wrote some very interesting papers. Most of the 10 articles are free.