Healthy Lifestyle, The Reason For Slowing Aging

Healthy Lifestyle, The Reason For Slowing Aging

In order to enjoy a long life and stay healthy in old age, you need to stick to the 'basic'. The basics are eating a healthy, vegetable-based diet, exercising regularly, investing in healthy relationships, reducing stress, and getting enough sleep.

So, why is this lifestyle beneficial to the body? That's because a healthy lifestyle influences your genes, new research suggests. Measuring DNA changes in people with healthy lifestyle changes revealed that eating well, getting a good night's sleep and managing stress can slow the aging process. The conclusion is that healthy behavior can actually change our body's cells to function better.

Scientists have long known that certain lifestyle factors make us healthy. The study is interesting because it is one of the first randomized controlled trials to measure the effect of lifestyle interventions on DNA, a key indicator of biological age.

In a small pilot study by a US research team, when 18 middle-aged men strictly followed a healthy lifestyle (a healthy diet, sleep, exercise and relaxation guidance, probiotic supplements, etc.) for 8 weeks, their biological age was about 3 years compared to a control group. appeared to be younger.

The researchers randomly divided 43 healthy adult males into two groups. One group followed a rigorous program for eight weeks. They ate 7 cups of vegetables a day, as well as healthy animal protein, including liver, eggs, and grass-fed meat. Eat good fats such as olive oil and nuts, and limit simple carbohydrates as much as possible. They were asked to sleep at least 7 hours each night, practice breathing exercises twice a day, and do moderate-intensity exercise for at least 30 minutes a day for at least 5 days a week.

The group that followed this lifestyle had an average biological age of 1.96 years younger at the end of the experiment compared to the beginning of the experiment, whereas the control group received a higher score by an average of 1.27 years or more, resulting in a three-year difference between the two groups.

"This is an interesting result," said Kara Fitzgerald, a functional medicine physician in Newtown, Connecticut, as first author of the study. Aging is the biggest risk factor for chronic diseases, so if you can slow down the biological effects of aging a little, your quality of life can be significantly improved.

When scientists first mapped the genome in 2003, they hoped to uncover a single gene that causes diseases like cancer and heart disease. However, the answer was more complicated than expected. "All genes have to come together to influence cancer, heart disease and other diseases," Fitzgerald explains. 

This led to efforts to understand not only the genes that influence disease and health, but also the epigenetics that are affected by lifestyle and environmental factors.

As a result, attention was paid to ways to change gene expression through lifestyle. DNA uses molecules known as methyl groups to change the way genes are expressed. DNA methylation is essential for the healthy growth and development of cells. Removing the methyl group from the DNA strand activates the gene. Adding a methyl group deactivates it. For healthy aging, inactivation of genes linked to inflammation or cancer is particularly important.