What should you eat to age slower?
Many tried to answer this by looking at the diets of extreme agers, but these anecdotal n=1 stories are often misleading. Take Jeanne Calment, the oldest person ever documented, who reportedly ate 1 kg of chocolate per week. Great news for chocolate-lovers, but not very scientific.
With the development of epigenetic clocks that measure biological age, we can now answer the question more scientifically. By analysing the biological age of thousands of individuals, we can identify which nutritional patterns are linked to either accelerated or decelerated ageing.
In short: what do people who age more slowly actually eat?
Together with two incredibly talented MSc thesis students, Daimy Bach and Ynte Biemans, we started a very exciting project using data from 4000 post-menopausal American women. This rich dataset includes dietary intake, DNA methylation, and key confounders like lifestyle, medication use, and body composition. For each participant, we calculated biological age using the PhenoAge clock and compared it to their chronological age to identify who was ageing faster or slower.
Using Copula Graphical Modeling (with guidance from model developer Pariya Behrouzi), we identified dietary habits linked to biological ageing. This hypothesis-free, data-driven method corrects for all confounders, providing robust associations between diet and ageing.
Here are the exciting results:
Nutrients related to decelerated ageing: #Coumestrol, #Betacarotene, #ArachidicAcid
Nutrients related to accelerated ageing: #Sodium, Added #sugar, #VitaminA, #BehenicAcid, #EicosenoicAcid, #ArachidonicAcid
Food groups related to decelerated ageing: #Nuts, #Poultry, #Peaches/ #nectarines/ #plums, Discretionary oil, Solid #fat
Food groups related to accelerated ageing: #Eggs, #OrganMeat, Sausages, #Cheese, #Legumes, Starchy #vegetables, Added #sugar, Lunch #meat, #Fat added after cooking
Both papers are now published, open access:
Food groups: https://lnkd.in/g_dbTr8j
Nutrients: https://lnkd.in/gdBjuANR
Simin Liu Steve Horvath Aladdin Shadyab @ #coumestrol #sugar #nuts #betacarotene #organmeat #VitaminA #ArachidicAcid #BehenicAcid #EicosenoicAcid #ArachidonicAcid #ageing #nutrition #epigenetics #phenoage #aging #WUR #WHI #DuSRA #HealthyAgeing #HealthyAging
