A fountain of Youth? Not literally. But older adults who changed the balance of fat, carbohydrates, and animal protein in their diets showed signs of reduced biological age after just four weeks. And that could signal a major breakthrough!
“New research from the University of Sydney found that Australians aged 65 to 75 who reduced either dietary fat or animal-based protein showed signs of a lower biological age after just four weeks,” an abstract of a new Australian lifestyle study reports.
Calendar years don’t count
“Biological age is an estimate of how old the body appears based on its health and physiological condition, rather than the number of years a person has been alive.,” the study preamble explains.
What they did
Researchers at the University of Syndney (Australia) created four different diets and tried them out on 104 participants each of whom were randomly assigned to one of the four.
“Every diet provided 14 percent of total energy from protein. Two of the diets were omnivorous (half coming from animal sources and the rest from plants), while the other two were semi-vegetarian (with 70 percent of protein coming from plant sources).”
Within those groups, participants were assigned either a diet higher in fat and lower in carbohyd-rates or one lower in fat and higher in carbohydrates.
Participants’ BMI (body mass index) ranged from 20-35 (normal through entry-level obese). All were non-smokers and non-vegetarians, and none had serious complications (e.g., type-2 diabetes mel-litus, cancers, renal or liver disease) or food allergies and/or intolerances.
What they found
The omnivorous high-fat group experienced no meaningful change in the biological age calculated from their biomarker profiles. That diet was also the most similar to what participants had been eating before the study began. The other three groups, however, all showed reductions in the estim-ated biological age of their biomarker profiles.
The strongest statistical evidence appeared in the omnivorous high-carbohydrate group. Those participants ate a diet in which 14 percent of energy came from protein, 28-29 percent from fat, and 53 percent from carbohydrates.
The takeaway
“Longer term dietary changes are needed to assess whether dietary changes alter the risk of age-related diseases,” said Associate Professor Alistair Senior, from the School of Life and Environmental Sciences and the Charles Perkins Centre, who supervised the research. “It’s too soon to say definit-ively 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.”
My take
I’m surprised the high-carb, omnivorous diet produced such remarkable positive changes in the observed physical age of that group’s participants. I’d have thought it would be one of the most underperforming in the overall experiment.
The experts keep defaulting to the principle of ‘eating a balanced diet high in fresh fruits and veggies’ with somewhat more modest carb and protein contents. Now, even the national dietary recommendations for most Western countries may have to bend to accommodate the news.
Those long-term studies recommended by the research team can’t come soon enough to quell my curiosity…
~ Maggie J.