Healthy Aging and Food

Allison Reppert
4 min readJan 21, 2021

Eating for eternity

In the quest for healthy aging and extreme longevity, we are leaving no stone unturned. Drugs (such as metformin or rapamycin), supplements (such as resveratrol), blood exchange and/or dilution, custom-made molecules, stem cells,…

So far, no magic potion.

One thing we do know, though, is that lifestyle and genetics matter. A lot.

When investigating the effects of lifestyle on longevity, it’s not the worst idea to go looking for places where people grow very old in good health. Enter the Blue Zones, locations that are demographic outliers where people have a roughly ten time higher chance of becoming a healthy centenarian.

These Blue Zones are geographically not exactly close neighbors, and neither are they culturally identical. Still, there are some shared characteristics:

  • Move gently throughout the day. Or, to rephrase: don’t sit on your behind from sunset to sundown.
  • Have a purpose, a reason to wake up. It doesn’t have to be a grand goal, but something that gives you ‘drive’.
  • Don’t stress & be engaged. Family, social life…
  • Eat mostly plants, and don’t overdo it on the calories. Include legumes.

See that last point? Food, it seems, matters for longevity.

But don’t be fooled by books/influencers promising you immortality via bespoke (probably expensive) concoctions or diets. Your longevity diet will be yours. That is: sure, we can glean some strong indications for certain dietary patterns (for example, mostly plant-based, limit the ‘ultra-processed’ stuff, and so on), but there are no individual food items that can make you live longer.

Dietary patterns > individual food items.

Personalized nutrition for longevity

A new review surveys our current knowledge about personalized nutrition for longevity and looks ahead:

Promoting healthy aging by tailoring nutritional guidance on the basis of a person’s individuality is an emerging science that has great promise.

Take note of the word promise. This means we’re not there yet.

The authors begin by distinguishing between biological and chronological age. The former is — roughly — how much different functions in your body have declined, the latter is how many pages of the calendar have been turned.

To assess the effect of nutrition on longevity, we best focus on biological age. After all, this is a better indication of our overall health, regardless of what the calendar says.

But what should we look at when evaluating how a certain dietary pattern affects our individual body? The researchers provide some suggestions:

  • Telomeres: the caps at the ends of our chromosomes that protect our DNA as it undergoes multiple cell divisions. Telomeres are often thought to be correlated with longevity. (I’m a bit skeptical about this one, especially in the elderly. See here.)
  • DNA methylation: this is the process whereby chemical tags (methyl-groups) are attached to DNA, which affects the function of the marked DNA chunk. The distribution and abundance of these ‘marks’ appear to correlate with biological age and this has led to the development of ‘aging clocks’ based on DNA methylation. (A recent review and meta-analysis suggests we should be cautious about these, though.)
  • Metabolomics: everything to do with metabolism, from gene variants to urine samples. This seems to have some promise. A ‘metabolic age score’ has been developed that correlates with survival and age-related conditions.
  • Multi-omics: the last and most complex option. This includes metabolomics, but also the other ‘omics’. So, gene activity, proteins, and so on. This too has some promise.

The most promising ‘aging clocks’ of the options above (metabolomics and multi-omics) are also the trickiest ones.

You end up with hundreds or (in the future perhaps) thousands of potential data points to include. Which combination to choose? Machine learning might be helpful here — and has already been used to develop aging clocks.

Next, the authors of the review address some challenges, such as the notorious unreliability of self-reported dietary assessments and the difficulty of evaluating the longevity effects of a dietary patterns in a population (the elderly) that is likely to suffer from various chronic conditions that can skew any of the aging markers discussed earlier. The effects of medication will also have to be taken into account.

Finally, they spend some attention on gene-diet interactions.

Disparities in the response of people to dietary factors have been documented for almost a century and even earlier, based on the expression attributed to Titus Lucretius Carus in the first century BC: “quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum” (Latin, meaning “what is food for one man may be bitter poison to others”).

To illustrate their point they use a very interesting study where, depending on specific gene variants, a low-fat or a Mediterranean (generally medium to high fat) diet is better for stroke prevention, fasting glucose reduction, and lipid concentration.

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