New Study Reveals Way to ‘Significantly Reduce’ Biological Age

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A study that developed biological age clocks to predict a person’s age, which may differ from chronological age, showed that a reduced-calorie diet among the trial participants caused a major reduction in biological aging.

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Published in the journal Nature Aging on Thursday, the study, whose research was funded by Singapore’s Ministry of Education, reiterates similar findings from recent years, most of which sourced data from the national Comprehensive Assessment of Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy (CALERIE) study.

“Our analysis of CALERIE participants suggests that 2 years of mild caloric restriction significantly reduces biological age,” the study said.

salad bowl
Pictured is a garden salad with grated carrots and fresh sprouts. A new study suggests that reduced-calorie diets can reduce biological aging.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Chronological age is a straightforward measure of age—simply put, it’s the number of years since a person was born. Unlike biological age, it does not account for health, lifestyle, genetics, epigenetics and environmental factors. Biological age can be determined by biomarkers, epigenetic alterations and physiological factors, among others.

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In the scientific community, biological age can provide a more nuanced and accurate reflection of an individual’s aging process because biological age does not increase at the same rate for everyone.

“Biological age (BA) is the most important risk factor determining individual risk of morbidity and mortality, with true BA of individuals generally different from chronological age,” the study’s researchers wrote.

While the calorie restriction CALERIE participants “achieved only relatively moderate CR (12%),” the study said, “this nevertheless resulted in a significant reduction in several known CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk factors, with reduction in BA estimates.”

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In sum, the study said the “data suggest that CR, under the conditions realized in CALERIE, was able to significantly reduce biological aging.”

Daniel Belsky, an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told Newsweek: “The CALERIE data in this paper confirm our previous findings indicating that the CALERIE intervention slowed the pace of biological aging.”

He said that “the observation of this similar result is important because the authors are using different tools developed in different ways to test the hypothesis and getting the same result.”

“That builds confidence that CALERIE intervention really did slow biological aging,” said Belsky, who has studied the relationship among caloric restriction, epigenetics and aging and published a paper about epigenetic clocks last year in Nature Aging.

Earlier this year, a study at Penn State exploring the connection between calories and aging, analyzed data from 175 participants after 24 months of caloric restriction. It found that after one year of this restriction, the participants lost their telomeres more rapidly than those on a standard diet. But after two years once the participants’ weight had stabilized, they began to lose their telomeres more slowly, and near the end they had roughly the same-length telomeres as those on a standard diet.

Telomeres, made from DNA sequences and proteins, cap and protect the end of chromosomes. They become slightly shorter every time the DNA is copied to produce new cells, so their length can be a useful indicator of cells’ biological age.