Eat this food every day to slow down how fast you age
A large American study analyzing nearly 5,000 people linked diets built around plant-based foods to slower biological aging. This means that it will not slow down the physical appearance of aging, but rather slow down your DNA’s level of decay.
It’s all based on what the researchers call the epigenetic clock, a method that tracks chemical changes that affect how genes behave over time. Another way to think of it is like the rings you count to tell the age of a tree. We may look a certain age, and numerically we may be a certain age, but genetically, depending on a myriad of factors, including diet, we may be significantly older than we actually are, or much younger.
Researchers who published their findings in the journal Agingexamined data from two large long-term health studies and consistently found that people who ate more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and beans, along with eating fewer animal products, had noticeable signs of being biologically younger than their chronological age.
However, at an individual level, the difference was not too dramatic, although it was measurable and replicated across multiple datasets and aging markers, meaning it’s a finding that was thoroughly tested with the same result each time.
You might think the study participants were a bunch of vegans or vegetarians, but they weren’t. They were just typical Americans with diets somewhere in the middle. They ate some meat, but also supplemented with a lot of vegetables and such. Researchers found that even just a modest change in your diet by incorporating just a little bit more plant-based foods than usual was associated with slower aging.
‘Plant-based’ does not necessarily mean healthy
That said, the study found that not all plant-based diets are created equal. Diets high in refined grains, sugar, and processed foods, all of which are or could technically be plant-based, showed no benefit. In some cases, these higher-fat, ultra-processed diets were linked to faster aging, regardless of how “plant-based” they were.
A big problem here, of course, is the definition of “plant-based.” It’s a catchall term that, like many terms in the American food industry, is poorly defined, yet thrown around, often with reckless abandon to the term’s true meaning. The study, on the other hand, defined it clearly: it is the quality of plans in your diet. Meaning if not enough to just eat something plant based. The fresher the better.
As for why plant-based diets reduce aging at the genetic level, it’s really quite simple: plant-based diets tend to be higher in fiber and antioxidants and overall lower in compounds associated with inflammation, all things that we’ve long associated with better heart health and reduced disease risk.
The lesson here is that if you want to be one of those people who say things like “I don’t feel my age,” help yourself make it true on a genetic level by eating more plants. That’s especially relevant since a completely different team of researchers recently found that the rate at which your biological clock “ticks” may be a better predictor of your death than your actual numerical age.
