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 found in our healthful plant-based diet analysis, whereas refined grain, salt-preserved vegetable, dairy products, and pluck were major contributors from unhealthful plant-based diet analysis.
We identified three latent classes of accelerated aging trajectories: slow aging, medium-degree, and high-degree accelerated aging trajectories. Participants who had higher PDI or hPDI had lower odds of being in medium-degree (odds ratio = 0.75 for PDI; odds ratio = 0.73 for hPDI) or high-degree (odds ratio = 0.63 for PDI; odds ratio = 0.62 for hPDI) accelerated aging trajectories. Participants in the highest quintile of uPDI were more likely to be in medium-degree (odds ratio = 1.72) or high-degree (odds ratio = 1.70) accelerated aging trajectories. With a mean follow-up time of 8.40 years and 803 (6.28%) participants died by the end of follow-up, we found that participants in medium-degree (hazard ratio = 1.56) or high-degree (hazard ratio = 3.72) accelerated aging trajectory groups had higher risks of death than those in the slow aging trajectory.