Balancing Protein Intake, not cutting calories, May be key to long life

Does cutting calories really help as much as you think? Or could you just have a better balanced diet to help you live a long healthy life? That is the question posed in this article from http://www.sciencedaily.com/

"By carefully manipulating the balance of amino acids in the diet, we have
been able to maximise both lifespan and fertility," explains Dr Matthew Piper,
one of the study authors. "This indicates that it is possible to extend lifespan
without wholesale dietary restriction and without the unfortunate consequence of
lowering reproductive capacity."

"The fruit flies were fed a diet of yeast, sugar and water, but with differing amounts of key nutrients, such as vitamins, lipids and amino acids. The researchers found that varying the amount of amino acids in the mixture affected lifespan and fertility; varying the amount of the other nutrients had little or no effect......"

Although the human genome has around four times the number of genes as the fruit fly genome, there is a close relationship between many of these genes. Since it is easy to create mutants and carry out experiments on fruit flies, the functions of many fly genes have been established and newly discovered human genes can often be matched against their fly counterparts. Therefore, even though the fruit fly does not on the surface resemble humans, many findings about its basic biology can be interpreted for human biology.

Are we really that closely related to fruit flies? that is just mind blowing to me that scientist can relate a human with a fruit fly. We are like a million times bigger then they are. The article also says that the key to a longer life might actually lie within a diet instead of just counting how many calories you take in. Which also has me wondering, should i start taking protein< shakes?