Can Eating Diverse Foods Delay Aging?

Highlights

• Dietary diversity—measured by self-reported intake of foods from five major food groups—is associated with slowed aging.
• This connection may be due, in part, to reduced oxidative stress—an accumulation of reactive, cell-damaging molecules.
• These findings highlight the potential importance of a broad-spectrum diet rich in macro- and micronutrients as well as antioxidants to slow aging and prevent age-related diseases.

Published in Frontiers in Medicine, Li and Liao from the Jiujang No. 1 People’s Hospital in China analyzed data from 22,600 adults and showed an association between dietary diversity and slowed biological aging—an assessment of age based on cell and tissue function. Moreover, the researchers found a connection between dietary diversity and lowered levels of an enzyme associated with inflammation, glutamyltransferase (GGT). These findings underscore the potential of a diverse diet with food sources from all five food groups—grains, vegetables, fruits, meat, and dairy—to slow aging and stave off age-related diseases.

Previous research has associated different types of diets like the Mediterranean diet to a lower incidence of age-related diseases. What’s more, one study also linked the Mediterranean diet with a slowed pace of aging, yet no research before Li and Liao’s study had examined whether  dietary diversity may influence one’s pace of aging. Hence, this study provides some of the first data suggesting that the diversity of foods in one’s diet may contribute to slowing aging.

Dietary Diversity Is Associated with a Slower Pace of Aging

Li and Liao aggregated dietary diversity scores (DDSs) by collecting data from two separate rounds of participants’ self-reported consumption of foods over 24-hour periods. In this way, they assessed the diversity of food intake from the five major food groups across all of the participants.

In conjunction, the China-based researchers measured the biological age—an estimate of age based on cell and tissue function—of study participants. The researchers then subtracted chronological age (age in years) from the biological age scores, and scores below zero suggested slowed aging, while those above zero predicted aging acceleration. The researchers sought to apply assessments of biological age and predictions of the pace of aging to find whether a correlation exists between higher dietary diversity and slowed aging.

Interestingly, Li and Liao’s analysis showed that higher DDSs correlated with slower paces of aging. This evaluation came from the observation that with increasing DDSs in the study population came lower values of age acceleration. Furthermore, Li and Liao’s data showing a negative correlation between DDSs and age acceleration nearly fit a line when graphed, suggesting that increasing dietary diversity is proportionally associated with slowing age acceleration.

To get a better grasp on how increasing dietary diversity may slow aging, Li and Liao looked at blood levels of molecules and cells that clinicians can use to make health prognoses. Of these molecule and cell indicators, Li and Liao found that higher DDSs correlated with lower white blood cell (WBC) counts and lower GGT—enzymes that serve as indicators of oxidative stress and inflammation. Since elevated WBC and GGT enzymes suggest elevated inflammation, Li and Liao conjectured that a higher dietary diversity may lower inflammation in the body.

Along these lines and because research has linked oxidative stress to aging by increasing inflammation, Li and Liao hypothesized that GGT may modulate the effect of higher dietary diversity on the pace of aging. Accordingly, they ran a statistical analysis and indeed obtained significant data suggesting that GGT levels modulate the pace of aging. Thus, these findings suggest that increasing dietary diversity, in part, lowers GGT enzyme levels and inflammation to slow the pace of aging.

More Research Necessary to Uncover How Dietary Diversity May Slow Aging

The results from this study provide interesting findings suggesting that higher levels of dietary diversity may help to slow one’s pace of aging. All the same, the study was observational and could not pinpoint that increased dietary diversity causally slows aging. In that sense, it could also be the case that people with access to more diverse diets enriched in a variety of food have more wealth and hence, possibly less stress, which may contribute to a slower pace of aging as well.

It also remains uncertain whether one can slow their pace of aging by switching from eating a diet with low dietary diversity in their early years to a diverse diet later. In that sense, all the study shows is a correlation between people who currently eat a diverse diet and a slowed pace of aging.

“These findings support the hypothesis that a diverse diet may play a key role in slowing the biological aging process,” say Li and Liao.