Cut sugar from your diet to lower your biological age: study

There is no sugarcoating this news.

We know too much sugar is bad for us – now, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco say that even when we eat healthily, every gram of added sugar ages our cells.

The US Food and Drug Administration recommends limiting added sugar to 50 grams per day. Sugar comes in many forms—a bar of milk chocolate has about 25 grams, while a 12-ounce soda has about 39 grams.

61.5 grams of added sugar was the average daily intake for 342 Northern California women in the UCSF study. The participants were mostly around 40 years old.

The authors of the study were more interested in their biological age, which is the age of our cells and tissues. This number is influenced by genetics and lifestyle habits like diet and exercise – it can be higher or lower than our chronological age, which is the number of years we’ve lived.

Researchers linked healthy eating — especially a Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, nuts and seeds — to a lower biological age.

Added sugar accelerated biological aging, even if the sugar was part of a healthy diet.

“We knew that high levels of added sugars are associated with worsening metabolic health and early disease, perhaps more than any other dietary factor,” said study co-author Elissa Epel, a UCSF professor in the Department of Psychiatry. and Behavioral Sciences.

“Now we know that this has accelerated [biological] aging underlies this relationship, and this is likely one of the many ways that excess sugar intake limits healthy lifespan,” Epel added.

Eliminating 10 grams of added sugar from your daily diet can reduce your biological age by 2.4 months over time, researchers said.

High blood sugar levels can damage cells, leading to chronic inflammation, which has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, liver disease and cancer.

Sugar drives obesity – a widespread public health crisis in the US – and tooth decay.

The UCSF findings were published Monday in JAMA Network Open.

The researchers noted the diversity of their study population, which included both black and white women, but acknowledged that the dietary information was based on three-day self-reported food data, which may have underestimated or overestimated some nutrients.

A separate study also published on Monday suggests that eating a vegan diet for just eight weeks can slow biological aging. One expert noted that the vegan diet had fewer calories than the omnivore diet, and the vegan participants lost weight, which may explain the diet’s effect on cells.

The analysis is part of studies led by Stanford Medicine on the health outcomes of identical twins. Some of the research is featured in the Netflix documentary series You Are What You Eat, which premiered in January.