If you’ve been huffing and sneering and pooh-poohing me for harping about the inevitable, imminent switch we all have to make to Plant-Based diets… Here’s a pooh-pooh back at you! Plant-based foods may help de-age you!
The example provided with the source post: A month on a
plant-based diet can visibly de-age some seniors!
You can spend tens or hundreds of dollars on skin products that claim to ‘make you look visibly younger’ in days. Or Weeks. Or… Scientists now claim, you can just switch to a plant-based diet for a month. But you have to be one of the lucky ones for whom the ‘hack’ works…
Go ahead; be skeptical
I was at first, even though the headline appeared above an abstract of a peer-reviewed university lab study. But after I understood the details, I was all-in. The ‘magic formula’ can be boiled down to: fewer fats, more carbs, and a switch to plant-source proteins…
What they did
Researchers at University of Sydney (UoS) (Australia) randomly assigned 104 study participants aged 65 to 75 to 4 different groups. Each was assigned a different diet. But all four eating plans contained the same amount 0f protein – just from different sources.
Two diets were omnivorous, with half of the protein coming from animal sources and the remainder from plants. The other two were semi-vegetarian diets, in which 70 percent of the protein came from plant sources. Within each group of 2, half the participants were also assigned either a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet or a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.
The researchers tracked 20 different bio-markers for aging over a 4-week period.
What they found
The researchers calculated each participant’s biological age, based on variables such as cholesterol, insulin, and protein levels.
When the numbers were tallied… It turned out that the group which ate an omnivorous, high-fat diet showed no change in their biological markers from before they started on their assigned diet. The other three groups all showed varying amounts of benefit as measured by the participants’ bio-markers.
In general… Older adults who cut back on dietary fat or reduced the amount of animal-based protein they consumed showed signs of becoming biologically younger.
The takeaway
“Longer term dietary changes are needed to assess whether dietary changes alter the risk of age-related diseases,” observed Associate Professor Alistair Senior, from UoS’s School of Life and Environ-mental Sciences and the Charles Perkins Centre, who supervised the research.
“It’s too soon to say definitively that specific changes to diet will extend your life. But this research offers an early indication of the potential benefits of dietary changes later in life,” Team member Dr Caitlin Andrews from the UoS’s School of Life and Environmental Sciences said.
My take
I’ve been consciously skewing my diet away from animal protein and toward vegetable sources for about the past year. Practicing what I preach. But not in a big way. Time to push the envelope further…
And I now know that skewing away from fats (and toward carbs?) is another positive change I can make. What did you get out this report?
~ Maggie J.