2012-07-21.
I've now added the (not entirely self-explanatory...) PowerPoint slides (here). They're best used as notes to accompany the actual talk (which was partly improvised as a result of some last minute requests for topics to touch upon), which Christine will have online soon.
Note: I had serious problems with this domain name. If you've sent email to me, and I haven't responded, it's because I never received the email (and you probably didn't get a bounce message). Everything's working fine now, though.
The following is from my presentation as originally prepared, though I had to leave most of it out, in order to spend more time on the question of whether or not CR actually works in humans, since so many people asked for more details on that!
And my view of the robustness of the CR effect -- that it doesn't require extraordinarily precise amounts of nutrients to kick in -- informs my CR practice, and makes me feel confident that, for example, just trying to eat nutritiously this weekend, without knowing how many milligrams of zinc or selenium I'm consuming, is not going to harm me. Roy Walford, the first researcher to suggest that humans try CR, also adopted this approach.
Still, I'd strongly recommend that everyone, those thinking about CR or not, get some idea of what they're eating. It's actually fun to do it at least once.
Twenty years ago, I wrote my own little, extremely user-hostile program to analyze my diet when I started CR, but today there are many great programs available for diet analysis. Here are three:
http://cronometer.com/ (Free. Web-based, or stand-alone program. Designed for CRers.)
http://www.nutritiondata.com/ (Free. Web-based. Search for foods that contain particular nutrients.)
http://www.nutribase.com/ (Not free -- though some versions are cheap. Has great "find food with nutrients I'm short on" function.)
Cron-o-meter was designed specifically for people practicing CR. There's a Web version and a stand-alone version. It's user-friendly and actually fun to use. The one problem with it -- shared by almost all nutrition programs -- is that you can't just press a button and have a list of foods appear that would solve whatever nutrient shortages you might currently have. So it has to be combined with something like nutritiondata.com, which is also free, and has a search function that enables you to find foods with high quantities of particular nutrients (for example, those Cron-o-meter indicated you are short on). But it's easy to use these two programs in combination. And you learn a lot about nutrition when you start plugging in your favorite foods into the software, searching for foods with certain nutrients, etc.
Nutribase isn't free, but offers a version that doesn't cost too much -- around $80 -- that has a function for searching for foods that will make up for deficiencies in what you've so far entered into the program.
Most nutrition analysis programs also allow you to track other things, such as weight, exercise levels, and so on.
If you have any comments, please send to president at crsociety dot org.
More CR resources are available here: http://www.crsociety.org/.
Thanks to everyone for a great conference!