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A new study showed that biological markers of age known as epigenetics can testify to a younger or older biological age than what is typically thought by looking at one’s chronological age.
The results showed that maximizing micronutrients in the diet and minimizing added sugar contributed to a lowering of the biological age, while the opposites were associated with an increase in the biological age.
On the face of it, it’s perhaps not any great surprise for someone who spends as little as a moment thinking about what’s best for their fitness and function, but the study contains key insights that the authors suggest could merit the alteration of long-established nutritional guidelines.
Published in the journal Genetics and Genomics, the study authors believe themselves to be the first to examine epigenetic aging and nutrient content in diets. Epigenetics as a scientific field is relatively new, but being that micronutrients such as vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, and antioxidants provide all the raw materials for cellular replication, DNA repair, and methylation, it was inevitably going to be an important study area for dieticians.
‘Epigenetics’ is a term defined as changes in the pattern of DNA expression in response to environmental stressors, and they affect how individual genes express themselves without changes in the genetic code itself. They can be inherited from previous generations, especially from parents, and they can be tracked through the pattern of DNA molecules acquiring a methyl group—a term called methylation.
Endogenous DNA damage occurs frequently, including about 50 double-strand DNA breaks per cell cycle, and about 10,000 oxidative damages per day. During the repair of double-strand breaks, many epigenetic alterations are introduced, and in a percentage of cases epigenetic alterations remain after the repair is completed.
By monitoring changes and methylation in 9 key biological indicators, the GrimAge2 epigenetic “clock” is considered one of the most robust and sensitive for predicting one’s real age—or the quality and intactness of their genetic code.
The authors used GrimAge2 in their study, and presumed that consuming fewer micronutrients and more added sugar would increase biological age above what might be written on a person’s ID.
Nutrients not food
Many of this cross-sectional study’s structural elements are standard in the field of nutrition research. For example, to monitor micronutrients, the authors tracked how well participants adhered to two common diets for promoting lower disease risk, including the Alternate Mediterranean Diet and the Alternate Healthy Eating Index 2010. However, rather than tracking how well the study subjects adhered to the food in the diet, they tracked how well they followed the nutrients contained in the diet.
This allowed them to cut through quite a bit of sociocultural noise around dietary eating habits that render many diets, the Mediterranean Diet most of all, completely irrelevant as scientific benchmarks.
The study included women participants of the 1987-1997 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study (NGHS), which examined cardiovascular health in a community cohort of Black and White females aged between 9 and 19 years. Of these participants who were recruited between 2015 and 2019 from NGHS’s California site, 342 females had valid completed diet and epigenetic assessments.
Among most of the participants, the average adherence to nutrient intake according to the author’s novel rating scale was 13.5 out of 24—in other words, most people got a little over half of the nutrients they required to maintain robust genomic health and maintenance.
“In both unadjusted and adjusted models, all dietary exposures were statistically and significantly associated with GrimAge2 in the hypothesized, anticipated direction,” the authors write, noting that the average added sugar intake was 61 grams. “Each gram increase in added sugar intake was associated with a 0.02 increase in GrimAge2, reflecting accelerated epigenetic aging”.
“From these findings, even in healthy dietary contexts, added sugar still has detrimental associations with epigenetic age,” they go on to conclude. “Similarly, despite higher added sugar intake, healthier dietary intakes appear to remain generally associated with younger epigenetic age”.
In other words, added sugar will detract from epigenetic aging reductions experienced on a nutrient-dense eating pattern, while switching to more nutrient-dense foods can help ameliorate the effects of a diet high in added sugars on epigenetic age.
Some people, especially in Mediterranean Europe, will adopt the idea that too much of anything is bad, including too much health-consciousness. These findings contain several important considerations for someone considering how greatly they want to consider health: namely that average American women in middle age consume only around 55% of the nutrients they need to maintain their genetic code.
Every mealtime is an opportunity to fortify one’s body with what one needs to build and maintain their key biological systems. Every time nutrient-sparse foods like pasta, pizza, or boneless skinless chicken breast are selected over nutrient-dense foods, one of a finite number of opportunities is lost. WaL
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