The quest for longer life has driven searches for the Fountain of Youth, had billionaires consider transfusions of the blood of the young, and is perhaps one of the biggest motivating factors that gets people to change their diet or to start exercising.

A significantly longer and healthier life would be almost invaluable. What wouldn't people give for an extra decade or two, especially if they stayed able-bodied and clear-minded for that extra time?

The quest for longer life has driven searches for the Fountain of Youth, had billionaires consider transfusions of the blood of the young, and is perhaps one of the biggest motivating factors that gets people to change their diet or to start exercising.

Researchers know those last two changes can make people healthier, but none of these strategies has yet been found to slow the aging process itself.

But there's more and more evidence that one particular anti-aging strategy might work, if we can figure out how to translate promising animal results to humans.

Significant caloric restriction — cutting caloric intake by about 30% — is at this point the anti-aging intervention that researchers think might actually stave off the physical processes that make cells slower to heal, opening up the brain and body to disease.

A new study on mice published August 24 in the journal Nature adds even more evidence supporting the potential anti-aging effect of caloric restriction and showing precisely how it happens in those animals. Previous studies have shown that mice on restricted diets live longer, but they've often failed to show why, according to a commentary published alongside the Nature study. The new study compared the physiology of mice on restricted diets and mice that could eat whatever they wanted. The physiological differences they found show exactly how significantly cutting calories appears to affect the brain and neuromuscular system, slowing changes that we associate with aging.

There is still no proof that this sort of intervention works in humans, and several prominent researchers studying aging told Business Insider that they don't expect to see any data saying that humans should or could safely cut calories that much.

It'd be hard to safely run a study asking an aging human population to cut their caloric intake by 30%, Dr. Leonard Guarente, the Novartis Professor of Biology at the Glenn Laboratory for the Science of Aging at MIT, told Business Insider. It'd be even harder to ensure that people actually to stick to a diet like that, he said.

But data like this fascinates scientists who are studying aging, as it may help lead us to some way to replicate the effects of caloric restriction without actually putting people on dangerous diets.