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Women who rust a Mediterranean - style dieting may live longer than those who do n’t , grant to new field that looked at one marker of aging .
cleaning woman in the discipline who wipe out more Mediterranean foods — such as vegetable , fruits , nuts , legumes , crude grains , Pisces and olive rock oil — and drank restrained measure of wine-colored with their meals had longer telomere in their descent cells . Telomeresare sequences of DNA that form protective hood at the end of chromosomes .
Telomeres get little every time a cubicle divides , so their length is think to be a measure of a cell ’s aging . Stress and inflammation may also expurgate masses ’s telomeres , the researcher enunciate in the bailiwick , published today ( Dec. 2 ) in the journalThe BMJ .
TheMediterranean dietis rich in antioxidant and anti - inflammatory compounds , and may buffer that shortening , said the study ’s aged writer , Immaculata De Vivo , an associate prof at Brigham and Women ’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School . [ Extending Life : 7 way to Live Past 100 ]
" To our cognition , this is the gravid population - base report specifically addressing the association between Mediterranean dieting adherence and telomere distance in healthy , halfway - ripened women , " De Vivo suppose in a statement . " Our final result further support the benefits of adherence to this dieting to advance wellness and longevity . "
The report include nearly 4,700 womanhood who were participating in the Nurses ' Health Study , a long - term bailiwick following the wellness of more than 120,000 nurses working in the U.S. The researchers measured the length of telomeres in blood cells from sample the nurse gave between 1989 and 1990 . The researchers also hit the women ’s diets on a scale from zero to nine , with a higher turn indicating greater attachment to the Mediterranean diet .
They get that women with higher scores tend to have longer telomeres than fair sex with lower score .
" Our findings show thathealthy eating , overall , was associated with longer telomeres , " say study atomic number 27 - generator Marta Crous - Bou , a postdoctoral fella in the Channing Division of web Medicine . " However , the strongest association was watch among woman who bind to the Mediterranean dieting . "
For every point higher that a cleaning lady ’s dieting grade , her telomere duration corresponded with about 1.5 years less of aging , the researchers found . For good example , two women with a three - point deviation in their diet scores would show , on average , a 4.5 - yr difference in aging in their telomere . This is comparable to the difference between smokers and non - smokers ( 4.6 years ) , fighting and less active woman ( 4.4 years ) and char with high phobic anxiety wads and low phobic anxiousness scores ( 6 years ) , the research worker said .
But no one food in the dieting stood out as lengthen telomere . Future research may determine more specifically which aspects of the diet are link up withincreased telomere distance , De Vivo enunciate .
She and her fellow monish that the study has several limit . The researchers measured the adult female ’s telomere distance only at one degree in time , and did not look at whether change in dieting may influence telomere length as time die on . Moreover , many of the women in the study are of European ancestry , and telomere dynamics may be different in citizenry of other ethnicities .
Still , the report assures that the Mediterranean diet , " the cornerstone of dietetic advice incardiovascular disease bar , " is linked with dim ageing , said Peter Nilsson , a prof at Skåne University Hospital in Sweden , who was not involved in the study , writing in an opinion piece of music bring out along with the study in the journal .
