A new study has provided evidence that a healthy lifestyle can reverse aging, as measured by epigenetic age: Reversal of Epigenetic Age with Diet and Lifestyle in a Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial. This is the second study to show that epigenetic age can be reversed in humans (here’s a reminder to read the first).
They used the Horvath DNAmAge clock.
After a mere 8 weeks of a healthy lifestyle, the subjects’ DNAmAge was 3.23 years younger than the controls (and 1.96 years younger than the pre-trial DNAmAge of the treatment group).
The lifestyle interventions weren’t labeled as paleo, but they closely resemble the lifestyles that are recommended by Chris Kresser, Steven R. Gundry, and Dale Bredesen. The diet comes about as close as the diet of a typical paleo enthusiast to avoiding foods that have been available for less than 10,000 years. The recommended foods that I consider the least paleo are “coconut, olive, flaxseed and pumpkin seed oil”. The diet is more plant-based than the stereotypical paleo diet, but it’s well within the normal range of hunter-gatherer diets.
The study has a bunch of the usual limitations, such as a small sample size (18 people in the treatment group). There are also reasons for mild concerns about conflicts of interest, as some of the researchers work as functional medicine physicians, so their careers are mildly dependent on the popularity of the lifestyle approach being studied. As far as I can tell, that is likely to cause a level of bias that is rather ordinary for nutrition-related research. Oh, and the instructions are listed as “Patent pending”, but it’s unclear why they would meet the novelty requirements for a patent.
My main doubt comes from the difficulty of figuring out whether DNAmAge measures causes of age-related health problems, or whether it’s just measuring symptoms. I’m slightly more than 50% confident that epigenetic changes have some causal influence on aging.
This kind of trial raises questions about how well patients follow the instructions – most would find it difficult to “Avoid added sugar/candy, dairy, grains, legumes/beans”. The paper describes how they checked on patient compliance, but I didn’t see any data indicating what they found about compliance. So there’s some risk that they were especially lucky about getting patients to follow their instructions, and maybe future studies of this nature will show much weaker results due to poor compliance.
Lastly, it’s a bit odd that the control group appeared to age 1.27 years in 8 weeks. Maybe they were depressed about not getting any treatment? (This isn’t the kind of study where blinding is feasible). More likely it was just noise, but that’s a reminder that the small sample size provides lots of opportunity for luck to dominate the results. Even if we assume perfect measurement, there’s plenty of room for variation in lifestyles. Uncontrolled lifestyle changes, such as someone getting fired, could mess with the results enough to matter.
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