MattC is a good guy, and he's actually very intelligent.
I got an interesting reply from Layne Norton regarding his view on the calories/lifespan link btw. He agrees with you on the correlation between the two, yet addressed a few interesting issues that have yet not been included in the studies, that might be of interest to athletes.
please post the issues, this topic is of great intellectual and personal interest to me.
Typically the studies have 4 groups of individuals: 1) normal calories no regimented exercise, 2) normal calories w/ regimented exercise, 3) reduced calories no regimented exercise, and 4) reduced calories with regimented exercise
interestingly the 3rd group typically lives the longest, with the 4th group living the second longest and the first two groups living much shorter less healthy lives. The 3rd group is still active it's just that (in fact they tend to be much more active than the animals on full calories) they are just not forced to exercise a certain amount.
For humans the best simulation of this is weight training and other free form exercise on reduced calories, WITHOUT regular cardio.