The CR Society International (previously known as the CR Society or Calorie Restriction Society) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization composed of several thousand people practicing, supporting, and conducting research into calorie restriction as a means of slowing the aging process. It was founded in 1994 by Brian M. Delaney, Lisa Walford, and Roy Walford, along with several others. The group sponsors conferences, funds anti-aging research, and offers practical guidance to its members. It is supported by membership fees and donations.
Members of the Calorie Restriction Society International practice calorie restriction in a variety of ways. Because many other aspects of lifestyle—exercise, food supplementation, composition of diet—affect the same physiological processes as calorie restriction, lifestyle decisions are likely to either enhance the effects of calorie restriction or work against it. Society members strongly feel the need for answers about the effects of lifestyle choices. The Society is currently raising funds for a study designed to establish whether Calorie Restriction has the same effects on humans that it does on the wide variety of laboratory animals that have been tested, and to use newly available analytical tools to begin to establish genetic and cell-signaling profiles of human calorie restrictors and possibly correlate these profiles to clinical markers that are commonly available.