To live a longer life, health experts recommend avoiding cigarettes, exercising daily, and keeping your weight under control.
New research suggests there’s now another way to lengthen your lifespan, however–if you’re a woman.
According to a new study in the British Medical Journal, women who ate a diet modeled after the Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes healthy oils, fish, and vegetables, lived at least 1.5 years longer than women who didn’t follow a similar diet plan.
As for the reasons why, it has to do with telomeres–protective “buffers” at the end of chromosomes.
“To our knowledge, this is the largest population-based study specifically addressing the association between Mediterranean diet adherence and telomere length in healthy, middle-aged women,” says Immaculata De Vivo, senior author of the study and an associate professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “Our results further support the benefits of adherence to this diet to promote health and longevity.”
Drawing data from the Nurses’ Health Study, a study which examined the health of over 120,000 nurses from the U.S., researchers looked at 4,700 women who had given samples of their blood, which they used to look at their telomeres. Telomeres shorten when a cell divides, and rapid cell division–something bound to occur as a person gets older–serves as a way for researchers to measure the age of cells.
To researchers, this was crucial for figuring out the age of a woman’s lifespan cells.
From here, they also looked at their diets, determining how many of them adhered the most to the Mediterranean diet. As it turned out, researchers found that those who ate a diet closely resembling this diet had longer telomeres–suggesting their cells were aging more slowly.
“Our findings showed that healthy eating, overall, was associated with longer telomeres,” says Marta Crous-Bou, co-author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Channing Division of Network Medicine. “However, the strongest association was observed among women who adhered to the Mediterranean diet.”
However, when it came to specific foods, researchers were unable to determine if they had any impact on how fast cells aged. Instead, what may matter more is eating a healthy diet overall–and practicing other healthy habits as well.
“Future research may determine more specifically which aspects of the diet are associated with increased telomere length,” says De Vivo. “Prior research has linked the Mediterranean diet with better heart health, as well as a lowered risk for chronic disease and death.”
What This Means For You
Eating healthy matters–and modeling your diet after the Mediterranean could help you live a longer life as well, say researchers. The catch? Researchers only found benefits for women–no word yet if it can men live longer lives as well.
Readers: Have you tried this diet before?
Sources:
Mediterranean Diet Linked to Slower Aging in Women – FoxNews.com
The Mediterranean Diet is Good For Your DNA – NYTimes.com
Could a “Mediterranean” Diet Extend Your Life? (Study) – WebMD.com
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