Science has been investigating the trend of reverse aging that is gaining more and more followers. This time, we take the case of a group of women who, through a strict diet, managed to reduce their biological age by two months.
The phenomenon of “eternal youth” is back in the news, after the revelation of a study that was carried out with a sample of six women who They managed to reduce their biological age by almost 5 years on average in just 8 weeks.
That’s right, the research published in ‘Aging’ and ‘Aging-US’, led by Kara N. Fitzgeraldfrom the Institute of Functional Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University (United States), with the collaboration of the American Nutrition Association, used the reference of this group of women who completed a diet and lifestyle program designed to impact DNA methylation and measures of biological aging.
“The findings from this case series add to existing evidence suggesting that widely accessible and cost-effective dietary and lifestyle interventions, designed to support DNA methylation and widely considered safe, can reduce measures of biological aging and have the potential to affect the duration of healththe length of life and the economic burden of aging,” the report details.
Biological age vs chronological age
What exactly is the difference between biological and chronological age? In simple terms, chronological age is the how long you’ve been alivewhile biological age is “how old your cells are”according to Northwestern Medicine and reported by Fortune Well.
The biological age is also known as epigenetic age. The epigenome “consists of chemical compounds that modify or mark the genome in a way that tells it what to do, where to do it, and when to do it,” according to the US National Institutes of Health. These changes, influenced by environmental factors such as stress, diet, medications and pollution, can be transmitted from one cell to another as they divide, and from one generation to the next. They are also reversible, as this study seems to demonstrate.
Diet of eternal youth
To carry out the study, Kara N. Fitzgerald and her team carried out an eight-week program. This included guidance on diet, sleep, exercise and relaxation, probiotic and phytonutrient supplements, and nutritional counseling.
The dietary intervention consisted of ingesting weekly:
- The equivalent amount of two cups of leafy green vegetables (kale, chard, collards and spinach).
- Two cups of cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, arugula, kale, mustard greens, watercress, kohlrabi, kohlrabi, radish, chard, turnip).
- Three cups of intensely colored vegetables.
- A quarter cup of pumpkin seeds.
- Another quarter of sunflower seeds.
- Two servings of methylation adaptogens.
- One or two beets.
- A serving of eggs (5 to 10 per week) and probiotics (2 capsules).
- Experts also called for including “healthy” oils, such as olive oil, in the diet.
It was also required to perform a series of habits such as:
- Exercise for at least 30 minutes a day five days a week.
- Practice breathing exercises at least twice.
- Sleep at least 7 hours a day.
- Fast from 7 in the afternoon to 7 in the morning.
- Drink 8 glasses of water a day.
Decrease in biological age
Among the main conclusions, five of the six participants showed a reduction in biological age between 1.22 and 11.01 years with respect to their basal biological age. “There was a statistically significant difference in the mean biological age of participants before (55.83 years) and after (51.23 years) the 8-week diet and lifestyle intervention, with a mean decrease of 4.60 years,” the document states.
The mean chronological age at the start of the program was 57.9 years and all but one of the participants had a biological age lower than their chronological age at the start of the program, suggesting that changes in biological age were not related to the improvement of the disease and that, instead, could be attributed to underlying aging mechanisms.
The effect of stress on biological age
Previous research has documented a “sudden acceleration of biological age due to various stressful events”although this aging is reversed when the stressor disappears.
However, for some people, stress is not temporary and has a more permanent effect on aging. According to recent research presented at the European Psychiatric Congress in Paris, those who suffer from long-term mental disorders, such as depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder, are often biologically older than their chronological age, says Fortune.
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