Aug. 2, 2024 – When it comes to diet and nutrition plans, you’ve probably heard it all before: the keto diet, Atkins, paleo, the Mediterranean diet, intermittent fasting. Around every corner, there seems to be a different solution for your wellness woes. But following a vegan (or plant-based) diet could be the key to slowing your body’s aging process on a molecular level.
Researchers in a new study followed 21 pairs of identical twins for 8 weeks, providing one twin with vegan meals – made up mostly of vegetables, legumes, and fruit – and the other with meals that included meat and dairy products (an omnivorous diet). At the end of the study, bloodwork results showed that those who followed the plant-based plan had a lower biological age, along with weight loss and lower levels of low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, otherwise known as “bad” cholesterol.
The article, published in BMC Medicine, is an offshoot of Stanford University’s larger Twin Nutrition Study. There was a Netflix series that documented it, aptly titled You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment.
Unless you’re already a vegan or vegetarian, following a plant-based diet might sound too intimidating or altogether unfeasible. But nutrition experts want you to know that you don’t have to adopt an all-or-nothing mentality to eating plant-based; just changing up the ratio can do your body an anti-aging service.
Matthew Landry, PhD, a registered dietitian and an assistant professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, likes to compare going full-blown vegan to running a marathon.
“Running a marathon is great, but it might not be the right choice for everyone. But even going out and doing a mile walk is beneficial to your health overall,” said Landry, who was involved in the original Stanford twin study. “Just making small steps in the right direction stacks up over time, and then the harder stuff becomes easier to do.”
Even though the pool of people in the BMC Medicine study was small – only 42 in total – most of the studies on diet plans are limited because everyone has a unique genetic makeup and familial history that shape the way we eat and how our bodies respond to food. Researchers usually can’t control for biological or environmental factors. That’s why using identical twins to measure how nutrition impacts our DNA expression is so compelling – they can act as their own controls.
The problem with this study, though, is that the plant-based halves of the twin pairs took in fewer calories than their omnivorous counterparts, adding to the weight loss recorded in the research. That makes it hard for scientists to know how much of their overall health benefits were a result of the plant-based diet, the weight loss, or a combination of both.
The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, according to Nate Wood, MD, the director of culinary medicine at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, CT. While living longer is great, he said that what often gets lost in this conversation is the fact that making these changes to your diet can, more importantly, increase the number of years you are living a healthy, functional, and enjoyable life.
“It’s not easy, but it is simple,” said Wood. “What it comes down to is this: The more plants you eat, the better.”
