A recent study revealed that eating healthy foods may assist in slowing the biological aging process, and scientists stated there is no single diet that people require to follow.
A recent study published in Nature Communications discovered that 10 different healthy dietary patterns were linked to reduced biological aging.
Scientists stated people who followed healthier diets showed reduced age-related changes in their DNA.
The study assessed blood samples and dietary information from nearly 7,500 individuals. Scientists used three different epigenetic clocks to evaluate biological aging, assessing about 850,000 sites across the participants’ DNA.
Several diets showed benefits
Researchers compared participants’ eating habits with 10 established healthy dietary patterns, including the Mediterranean, Nordic, DASH and plant-based diets.
Scientists discovered that improved diet quality was linked to reduced biological aging across all 10 dietary patterns.
They mentioned that people could score highly on one diet while scoring lower on another, meaning there was no single eating pattern followed by all healthy eaters.
Lead researcher Juliana Tavares, a doctoral researcher at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, stated, “We applied three different approaches, so-called epigenetic clocks, to read biological aging.”
“To this end, we leveraged state-of-the-art technology, which allowed us to cover about 850,000 sites in the DNA. This is roughly twice as many as in most previous studies,” she added.
Smokers showed greater benefit
The research also discovered that smokers appeared to gain the most from healthier eating. Scientists suggested this could be because smokers have better potential health benefits to gain from enhancing their diet, given the harmful effects of smoking.
Over 70% of the biological pathways affected by the diets were shared across all 100 patterns. These pathways involve cell structure, cell signaling and metabolism that are essential for aging and chronic disorder.
Scientists stated some effects were certain to individual diets, including heart-related pathways associated with DASH and cognition-related pathways associated with the MIND diet.
The researchers concluded that people do not need a perfect diet to support healthier aging.
