Scientific Controversy Settled: Low-calorie Diet Enhances Monkeys’ Survival and Health

I've got 5 posts on caloric restriction with these interesting lines in them; What is your doctors answer to this idea? Would it help your stroke recovery?
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Caloric restriction has been showed to increase levels of a protein in the brain called BDNF. This protein is thought to be involved in the generation of new brain cells, Mattson said.
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Research on animals also suggests caloric restriction reduces neurological damage after a stroke, but only on young or middle-aged animals.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to dig further and ask: Could calorie restriction also delay nerve cell loss in the brain – and the changes in learning and memory that go along with it?
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Calorie restriction of 20 to 30 percent will increase neurogenesis. Intermittent fasting -- spacing the time between your meals -- will increase neurogenesis.
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It’s already well known that a diet may have a life-extending effect. Researchers from Leibniz Institute on Aging – Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI) in Jena, Germany, now showed that besides improving the functionality of stem cells in mice, a caloric restriction also leads to a fatale weakening of their immune system 
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http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2017/01/scientific-controversy-settled-low-calorie-diet-enhances-monkeys-survival-and-health?

Two research teams joined together to help settle on ongoing controversy in aging research – whether caloric restriction in rhesus monkeys helped the animals to live longer, healthier lives.
A team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one from the National Institute on Aging published their report Jan. 17 in the journal Nature Communications, validating that restricting calories was beneficial to monkeys.
“The rhesus monkey is an excellent model for human aging,” the authors wrote. Noting that nonhuman primates “are vital models for translating basic research into clinical application.” 
The controversy began when the two teams originally published papers that came to conflicting conclusions. The UW-Madison team reported in 2009 that monkeys on a low calorie diet saw significant improvements in survival, and lower incidences in cancer, cardiovascular disease and insulin resistance compared to a control group on a regular diet. Later in 2012, researchers from the NIA published a paper that found no substantial survival improvement, though it did suggest some health benefits.
“These conflicting outcomes had cast a shadow of doubt on the translatability of the caloric-restriction paradigm as a means to understand aging and what creates age-related disease vulnerability,” said Rozalyn Anderson, corresponding author and associate professor of medicine at UW-Madison in a statement.
The competing teams came together to perform a comprehensive evaluation of longitudinal data, including information gathered on nearly 200 monkeys from both of the original studies, and a picture emerged as to why the reports drew different conclusions.
Findings in the recent paper highlight fundamental differences in study design and implementation that may have contributed to the dissimilar outcomes.
One of the differences between the two studies was the age at when calorie-restriction began.  The NIA study tested calorie restriction in young and old adult males, and young, adult and old females.  In the UW-Madison study the calorie restriction diet began only in adult animals, approximately 8 years old.
Earlier studies in mice showed that very young onset life-long calorie restriction was more beneficial than adult onset.  However a comparative analysis showed that the same is not true in primates, and that while consuming less calories is beneficial in adult and older primates, it is not the case for younger animals.
A second difference in study design was the amount of food eaten by the control group. The UW-Madison control group was “free-fed” after establishing a baseline food intake measured over a three to six month period, implemented to reflect a study as it might have been conducted in humans. On the other hand the old-onset control group in the NIA monkeys were fed less than ad libitum, to avoid confounding effects of obesity.   
So less food intake in the NIA control monkeys was associated with improved survival compared to the UW-Madison controls.   The similar outcomes in survival between the control and restricted groups reported in the original NIA study, changed to a significant difference when compared to the UW-Madison data.  This suggests that even small changes in the amount of food intake could meaningfully affect aging and health, according to a university release.
A third and important difference between the two studies was diet composition.  The NIA monkeys were fed a naturally sourced diet, while the Wisconsin monkeys ate a semi-purified diet higher in fat and sugar content. The UW-Madison control monkeys were fatter than the NIA control animals which suggests that what food is consumed can make a significant differences for body composition and fat mass, when eating unrestricted amounts of food.
Although the original NIA study did not find caloric restriction extended life,  six of the original 20 monkeys in the study have lived beyond the 40-yuears old, which was the previous oldest lifespan recorded, while one old-onset calorie restricted monkey is currently 43 years old, which is a longevity record for this species, the authors report. 
“The clear benefit in survival estimates for monkeys within the old-onset cohort compared to UW controls suggests that food intake can and does influence survival,” the authors wrote.
How much calorie restriction results in the maximum benefit in rhesus monkeys has yet to be seen, but is something the teams are actively investigating.