(ANN/THE STAR) – The old saying “You are what you eat” might hold more truth than we think. According to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), women who consume too much sugar may appear older rather than sweeter, regardless of how healthy their overall diet is.
The study, published in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open journal, examined how different diets impact the “epigenetic clock,” a biochemical test used to estimate health and lifespan.
“The better people ate, the younger their cells appeared,” the researchers noted. They concluded that promoting healthy diets, especially those that limit added sugar, could support slower cellular ageing relative to one’s chronological age.
Dr Dorothy Chiu, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral research fellow at UCSF, highlighted the importance of diets rich in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients for disease prevention and health promotion.
Among the diets studied, the Mediterranean diet emerged as the healthiest, particularly for middle-aged women from diverse backgrounds.
“We’ve known that high levels of added sugars are linked to poorer metabolic health and early disease, possibly more than any other dietary factor,” said Dr Elissa Epel, co-author of the study and professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry. “Now we understand that accelerated epigenetic ageing may be one of the mechanisms through which excessive sugar intake reduces healthy longevity.”
