Study: Delay aging with curcumin, magnesium and other natural anti-inflammatories
The more anti-inflammatory compounds – like omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin/black seed oil, garlic, ginger and magnesium you take in, the slower you’ll age. Spanish nutrition experts observed this after carrying out a study that indicates that a diet with a low dietary inflammatory index delays the decrease of telomere duration.
Study
The experts calculated the duration of the telomeres in the blood cells of 520 Spanish citizens aged 55-88. Telomeres can be found in your DNA and work like a sort of molecular clock. The lengthier they are, the healthier you’ll be and the longer you may still have to live. The quicker your telomeres decrease, the quicker your process of aging runs.
The individuals within the study all had a higher risk of cardiovascular disease in common. They had high blood pressure or high degrees of triglycerides or bad cholesterol within their blood, or they were diabetic patients.
Dietary inflammatory index
The experts measured the dietary inflammatory index of the subjects’ diet. The greater the anti-inflammatory nutrients including vitamin C and E, omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin\black seed oil, polyphenols and zinc you consume in your diet, the lower your rating. And the lower your score the less inflammatory factors including CRP, IL-6 and TNF-alpha your body creates and the healthier you are.
The table below will provide you with a sense of which aspects determine a person’s dietary inflammatory index. Where there’s a minus sign the component is one that lowers the index.
Results
The chance that the participants had relatively shorter telomeres than you’d expect for their age, weight, sex, exercise and health was bigger the more their diet was likely to induce inflammation. The figure below shows this.
The researchers divided the participants into three equal-sized groups based on their dietary inflammatory index scores. Left: diet with a low inflammatory score; right: diet with a high inflammatory score.
After five-years the researchers got in contact with participants once again. They calculated whether their nutritional inflammatory index had gone up, and split the individuals again into three equal-sized groups, according to these scores.
They then identified the risk of their telomere length having diminished for all three groups. Again they adjusted their information for the impact of age, weight, sex, physical exercise and health.
The figure above indicates that a declining of diet sped up the decrease of the telomere length dramatically.
“Dietary inflammatory index scores were inversely linked to leukocyte telomere length, which implies that anti-inflammatory values of the dietary inflammatory index were relevant to longer telomeres in adults at high risk of cardiovascular disease”, the Spanish citizens explained.
“These findings are consistent with […] a beneficial effect of adherence to an anti-inflammatory diet on aging and health by preventing telomere shortening.”
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