Quality of Diet versus Pace of Aging

Given the advent of various clocks that measure biological age, one might expect that the research community will repeat and update past efforts to quantify the effects of diet, exercise, and other lifestyle factors on the long-term risk of age-related disease and mortality. The open access paper here is an example of this sort of work, focused on the impact of diet. The researchers made use of their own aging clock based on simple biomarkers, similar to Phenotypic Age, in order to determine a relationship between dietary quality and pace of aging. In this prospective cohort study of 12,784 participants, based on a recently developed biological aging measure acquired at four-time points within an 8-year period, we identified three aging trajectories where participants in medium-degree or high-degree accelerated aging trajectory groups had higher risks of death than those in the slow aging trajectory. We then found that adopting an overall plant-based dietary pattern was associated with lower odds of being in medium-degree or high-degree accelerated aging trajectories. Plant-based dietary patterns were assessed by overall plant-based diet index (PDI), healthful PDI (hPDI), and unhealthful PDI (uPDI) Our study demonstrated a differential impact of plant-based foods on accelerated aging trajectory, i.e., a healthful plant-based diet was more beneficial to aging than an unhealthful plant-based diet. Fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, and legumes were major contributors foun...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs