Yes, which is why I say you can quibble. But while CRONies indeed do that, the literature on classic CR studies is not uniform. A ton, especially of earlier studies, simply cut food rations with no macro or micronutrient adjustment, and the animal appeared to experience dose dependent life extension. And while CRONies did indeed stress the “ON” part, there has never been agreement as to what constitutes the “O”. Furthermore I am not aware of any studies showing the validity, necessity, or superiority of such adjustments. It appears that straight CR works. Whether adding ON gives better results needs proof.
Classic calorie reduction posited undernutrition without malnutrition, meaning you weren’t f.ex. feed the animals only sugar and in small quantities, because that would be malnutrition. Instead, what CR studies routinely did, was put the mice on standard chow, but smaller portions.
Until we have more sensitive studies we won’t know definitively if adding micronutrients to CR is beneficial. We do know that there is danger in such adding, because for example adding molecules (such as methionine) which trigger nutrient sensing pathways often can abolish the CR life extension benefits, despite the cut in calories. So it could be dangerous to add you don’t know what… f.ex. zinc might give the body a strong signal “plenty of calories”, because zinc rarely is consumed by animals without calories, so evolution primed the body to respond as if a huge dose of zinc means there is a surplus of food, and the body signals accordingly and your CR is wasted.
Bottom line, it is a cleaner intervention, when the body gets a pure signal “not much food, and not much anything that comes with food, methionine, cysteine, zinc, lithium(?), X”. But if it also gets a false signal because of supplements, the message becomes blurred, and your benefits might suffer or disappear. Little food means little food, period, and not "wait, little food but blood full of vitamins, minerals, aminoacids etc… feels like a lot of food!
As you can see, unless we have specific studies, you can never be sure how one intervention interracts with another - it might be additive, or subtractive, or neutral. Be careful assuming. Which is one of Matt Kaeberlein’s mantras: as you stack more and more molecules on top of each other, the odds of unanticipated interactions rises geometrically - fewer is simpler, safer, more knowable and better. YMMV.
