Diet guru who tried to live for ever bequeaths spartan regime

Roy Walford did not think he had cracked the secret of eternal life but he did believe he had figured out the next best thing. A university professor specialising in gerontology, he pioneered - and lived by -- a drastic "calorie-restricted" diet that could, in his view, extend the human life span to 120 years or longer.

Visitors who made the pilgrimage to his converted warehouse home in Venice Beach in California were routinely struck not by how good he looked on his carefully regulated intake of fruit, berries, nuts and the occasional nibble of meat but rather how alarming. He was wiry, stick-thin, and downright eccentric in the hair department - smooth-pated and entirely bald on top, with a Fu Manchu white moustache gracing his upper lip.

None of that, however, prevented him from being a heroic figure to the small circle of calorie-restricted fanatics he inspired. His work divided fellow scientists, who tended to agree he was on to something but doubted that a highly controlled near-starvation diet was something most people would have either the resources or the willpower to pursue safely.

In the end, Dr Walford died last week, just a few months short of his 80th birthday - the result not so much of faulty research as bad luck. Three years ago, he contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, an incurable condition that not even the most spectacular diet in the universe could have countered.

"If there's no cure for the disease, I certainly won't reach 120," Dr Walford conceded in his final interviews. "I probably won't reach 90." He insisted, however, that the disease had nothing to do with his diet. On the contrary, he thought his lean 1,600-calorie-a-day habit - roughly half of the intake of the average American male -- was the best chance he had to live a little longer.

There was nothing ordinary about Roy Walford. He punctuated his career as a professor of pathology at the University of California at Los Angeles with bizarre forays into the wider world. He once spent a year walking across India in a loincloth measuring the rectal temperatures of holy men. Another time he crossed the African continent on foot.

Most famously, he led a human experiment in the early 1990s in which he and eight other volunteers spent two years living in isolation in a space bubble of a building in Arizona called Biosphere 2.

The idea was to see whether they could sustain themselves over a long period - a prelude, presumably, to mankind one day colonising Mars or one of the other planets. When it became clear that the team could not grow enough food to provide a normal diet, Dr Walford put them all on his calorie-restricted regimen. They consumed vegetables and half a glass of goat's milk each day, with meat or fish consumed just once a week.

According to a scientific paper the team later published, nearly all unfavourable ageing markers slowed by about 20 per cent while they were in the biosphere. Their blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and triglyceride levels all fell. Naturally, they lost weight too - the men were down almost 20 per cent and the women down around 10 per cent.

There were, however, less desirable effects. The biosphere did not keep enough oxygen in the air, leading to symptoms suggesting the death of brain cells. Dr Walford believed that was where his Lou Gehrig's disease first took hold.

His career had begun 35 years earlier when, as a researcher at UCLA, he found that cutting the calorie intake of mice could almost double their lifespan and make them far more agile than their age would normally indicate. He then adapted the research to humans, demonstrating that fewer calories produced beneficial changes in blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol, especially if the diet was begun at young age.

He went on the calorie-restricted diet in 1984, and never gave it up. On a typical day, he once told the Los Angeles Times, he might have a low-fat milkshake, a banana, some yeast and berries for breakfast; a large salad for lunch; and fish, a baked sweet potato and vegetables for dinner. The idea was to keep the diet nutrient-rich despite the low number of calories.

By now, an estimated 1,200 people worldwide are CR followers, most of them in the United States. Although all swear by the benefits - greater agility and improved powers of concentration, as well as the prospect of living longer - most also concede that the diet is extraordinarily labour-intensive.

Many people end up eating exactly the same thing every day, to save themselves the mathematical legwork. Falling off the wagon is a common problem.

The underlying theory has found credence among many researchers, not just in Dr Walford's books with titles such as The 120 Year Diet and Beyond The 120 Year Diet. The US government's National Institutes of Health, for example, have just launched a pilot project in three cities to study the effects of calorie restriction more widely. Dr Walford was a man of many unexpected facets. As a young man, he and a fellow scientist analysed the number patterns of the roulette wheels of Las Vegas and Reno and made a killing until the casinos got wise to their methodology.

After a 20-year marriage, he became an inveterate womaniser, prompting jokes that the reason he wanted to live so long was because he needed time to meet more women.

He also rode motorbikes, and broke his leg while trying a wheelie on an LA thoroughfare. His unusual diet seems to be his lasting legacy.

EATING THE WALFORD WAY

Dos:

Eat plenty of both green leafy salad and other vegetables

Eat fruit

Eat small amounts of animal proteins such as chicken, fish

Balance non-animal proteins by combining different foods, eg, combining beans with grains and rice protein with vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower or spinach. If eating rice and grains, choose whole grains (not flours) and brown rice

Carefully select protein and fat sources

Eat monounsaturated fats

Replace calorie-dense foods with calorie-sparse nutrient-dense foods

Don'ts:

Avoid simple sugars and flours

Avoid saturated fats

Women planning to be pregnant should not go on the diet until after having and weaning baby

Make sure when dieting that weight is lost slowly

Source: Calorie Restriction Society website