You’re as young as your food

Improving diet quality is a proven anti-aging tool

Diet quality affects health, and eating well is associated with lower incidence and later-in-life emergence of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and with longer lifespans. There are several mechanisms – diet influences lipid profiles, sugar metabolism, inflammation and obesity rates for example, which are all culprits – that can account for the life extending traits of food. 

Could food also change how our genes are expressed?

Food doesn't change our coded DNA sequence – it isn’t gene therapy. But food and other lifestyle habits as well as our environment can modify how our genes are expressed and which areas of the genome get more active. This biomedical field is called epigenetics. Gene expression can be controlled through chemical changes such as methylation which is the addition of a methyl group to the DNA chain in an area that doesn’t code for the gene itself. There are millions of places where methylation can occur, and thousands of these sites correlate with aging. In this way the gene’s control switch is either repressed or activated. These changes can be stable over time and over many replications of the cell.

Methylation is the most studied of epigenetic mechanisms. Methylation status can predict lifespan; it’s like a biological clock that reflects biological age, as opposed to our chronological one. These methylation clocks predict mortality as well as disease better than knowing one’s birthdate. Previous studies looked at how certain foods change methylation patterns, suggesting that high intake of plant-based foods slows the clock, and high intake of poultry predicts an accelerated aging. Another small study of 120 65-79 year olds showed cellular slower aging when people ate a Mediterranean-style diet for a year.

A new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looks at the overall diet quality of a large group of almost 2000 people, to see if aging is affected on the molecular level.

Diet and aging

The diet of the participants was assessed by the DASH score, which evaluates the intake of dietary components: You get high scores for consuming more vegetables, fruit, nuts, legumes, whole grains and low-fat dairy, and for consuming less red and processed meat, sugary drinks, sweets and salt.

Blood tests were drawn for methylation profiling using 3 different verified epigenetic aging measures.

And the results:

During a 10-year follow up 297 participants died. The DASH score and the 3 epigenetic age acceleration measures were significantly associated with all-cause mortality. 

As you might have guessed, participants with high DASH scores tended to be women, thinner, not smoke, drink less alcohol, and use less medications for hypertension. But after adjusting for age, sex, smoking status, BMI, physical activity, alcohol consumption, and energy intake, eating lower quality diets was still clearly associated with a DNA methylation pattern that was “older” than the chronological age.

“Our study emphasizes that improving diet quality is important to delay the aging process,” the authors conclude.

Anti-aging the safe way

Some predict that tremendous technological and biomedical breakthroughs on the horizon are going to enable major gains in average human life expectancy. The anti-aging marketplace is already capitalizing on a bounty of (unproven) wrinkle defying creams, placentas, donkey milk, resveratrol and anti-aging pillows. But we actually already know that certain habits are associated with delayed aging. Chief among them are eating well, exercising, avoiding smoking and nurturing social ties.

What does eating well mean? There are very many ways to eat healthfully, and all of them center on emphasizing whole plant-based foods (vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes, whole grains) and minimizing highly processed foods (fast-food, processed meats, sugary drinks). 

Dr. Ayala