Plant-Based Diet Linked to Slower Biological Aging

Eating more healthy plant foods is linked to slower aging on the inside, with 38% lower odds of falling into the fastest biological aging group, a new study has found.

Researchers from Zhejiang University School of Medicine in China tracked a recently developed measure of biological age at four points over eight years in 12,784 adults from a large Asian cohort, with diet data for 10,191 of them. They found three aging paths: slow, medium and fast. People with higher healthful plant-based diet scores had 27% lower odds of medium and 38% lower odds of fast aging, with fresh fruit, vegetables and pulses doing most of the work. That matters because the fast agers had 3.7 times the risk of dying during follow-up. The study is published in BMC Medicine.

It is observational, and a diet heavy in refined grains and sweets was linked to faster aging. As vegconomist reports, the authors write:

Our findings suggested that increasing the intake of healthy plant-based foods while reducing the intake of unhealthy plant-based foods and certain animal foods slows down the aging process in an Asian population.

It fits with the UK Biobank finding that healthy plant-based eaters have a 16% lower risk of early death, and the estimate that eating more beans, whole grains and nuts could add over a decade to your life.

Plants might just be the best anti-aging cream there is!