Reacción a "Short-term vegan diet associated with benefits in biological ageing"

The study of the impact of diet in preventing unhealthy ageing and longevity is currently under study. Different approaches have been used, for example, examining whether a particular habitual diet, maintained over time, is associated with a lower risk of frailty or disability years later, or whether a dietary pattern with more plant-based foods is associated with later death compared to people who followed a different dietary pattern.
In this paper, researchers use a clinical trial to understand the impact of a purely vegetarian dietary pattern and a healthy omnivorous dietary pattern. It was conducted with 21 [pairs of] twins, so that sex, age or inherited genetic factors did not alter the comparison of intervention effects. For eight weeks, they were given food and instructions to maintain these dietary patterns. The outcome variable that approximated ageing was the degree of DNA methylation in the blood cells after the eight weeks and the calculation of an indicator called the ‘epigenetic clock’, which is able to summarise the degree of ‘ageing’ of cells by a series of measurable parameters. They found that participants who had followed a vegetarian diet had lower methylation and a lower degree of cellular ageing.

The originality of this study lies in the association of different dietary patterns with cellular markers of processes leading to cellular ageing. In this way, it confirms that diet acts by altering specific biological mechanisms that lead to better or worse ageing. However, despite the attractiveness of the conclusion, this type of work is not able to examine the effect of a vegetarian or omnivorous diet in the long term. Furthermore, to conclude that a diet is associated with healthy ageing or greater longevity, we need to see how these diets are associated with actual health problems in older people or how they are associated with dying later or later. For this, studies of large populations followed over many years (cohort studies) remain essential and the basis for making dietary recommendations to the population. This work is insufficient to recommend vegetarian diets to the population.