August 2, 2024 – When it involves food plan and nutrition plans, you've probably heard all of it: the keto food plan, Atkins, Paleo, the Mediterranean food plan, intermittent fasting. There appears to be one other solution to your wellness problems around every corner. But after a vegan (or plant-based) food plan may very well be the important thing to slowing your body's aging process on the molecular level.
Researchers in a brand new study followed 21 pairs of similar twins for eight weeks, feeding one twin vegan meals — consisting mostly of vegetables, legumes and fruit — and the opposite with meals that included meat and dairy (an omnivorous food plan). At the top of the study, blood test results showed that those that followed the plant-based plan had a lower biological age, together with weight reduction and lower levels of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, also referred to as ““bad” cholesterol.
The article, published in BMC Medicine, is an offshoot of the larger Twin nutrition studyThere was a Netflix series that documented this, with the fitting title You are what you eat: A twin experiment.
If you're not already vegan or vegetarian, a plant-based diet may sound too intimidating or completely unfeasible. But nutrition experts want you to know that you don't have to adopt an all-or-nothing mentality when it comes to a plant-based diet; simply changing the ratios can do your body an anti-aging service.
Matthew Landry, PhD, a registered dietitian and assistant professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, likes to compare switching to a completely vegan diet to running a marathon.
“Running a marathon is great, nevertheless it might not be the appropriate selection for everybody. But even walking a mile is nice for overall health,” said Landry, who was involved in the original Stanford twin study. “Even small steps in the appropriate direction add up over time, after which the harder things turn into easier.”
Even if the group of people in the BMC Medicine The study was small – only 42 in total – most studies of diet plans are limited because each person has a unique genetic makeup and family history that shape our eating habits and our bodies' response to food. Researchers usually can't control biological or environmental factors, which is why using identical twins to measure how diet affects our DNA expression is so compelling – they can act as their own control subjects.
The problem with this study, however, is that the halves of the twins who followed a plant-based diet consumed fewer calories than their omnivorous counterparts, which further compounded the weight loss seen in the study. This makes it difficult for scientists to say how much of their overall health benefits were due to the plant-based diet, the weight loss, or a combination of both.
The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, says Dr. Nate Wood, director of culinary medicine at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn. While living longer is great, what's often lost in this discussion is the fact that these dietary changes can – and more importantly – increase the number of years you live a healthy, functional and enjoyable life.
“It's difficult, nevertheless it's easy,” Wood said. “The bottom line is: the more plants you eat, the higher.”