Veganism's Impact on DNA
A new study explained
The teams at the UC San Diego and Freiburg U in Germany recruited 48 healthy adults for a study on how different diets affect your DNA.
For 30 days, 24 people followed a meat-rich diet roughly equivalent to what most Americans eat, while the other 24 followed a vegan diet. Both plans were similar in calories. They didn’t want things complicated by weight loss. Weight loss improves our health so dramatically all by itself that losing weight would throw off the study results. We wouldn’t know which benefits were from the weight loss and which from the change in the kind of food we eat.
RESULTS
The vegan diet showed improvements in immune functions, metabolism, and pathways associated with cell growth. After only one month, the planet-eating group had lower levels of neutrophils which cause inflammation, less inflammation over all, and higher levels of CD4 T-cells, which regulate immunity.
According to Newseeek: “The most striking finding emerged when the team examined several so-called “epigenetic clocks,” tools that estimate biological age based on DNA methylation patterns. According to two health-related epigenetic clocks known as PhenoAge and GrimAge, people following the vegan diet experienced a deceleration in biological aging over the month-long study period.”
That’s aging actually slowing down. And if they’d studied it a little longer, they’d have seen it reverse, because that’s what veganism does for us, as shown in numerous previous studies.
The vegan diet also influenced pathways related to fat metabolism, healthy insulin production, and a reduction “cancer-associated biological processes.”
Jerome Mertens, Ph.D., co-senior author of the study, said the speed of the changes came as a surprise. “…we typically think of epigenetic changes to be rather slow, or ‘sluggish,’ but lasting.”
Asked what advice he would give people who are not ready to adopt a fully vegan diet, Mertens said, “One could probably see similar directional changes by making plants the default and meat the exception,” he said.
Asked the same question, Maggie Shayne, your intrepid blog hostess said, “Why on earth would anyone not be ready to adopt a fully vegan diet?”
This is just the latest new addition to a plethora of studies that show a fully vegan diet drastically reduces the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, auto-immune disorders, excess weight, and even mitigates the harm from communicable diseases like Covid, RSV, and Flu.
Not to mention that it adds an average of eight healthy years to our lives.
Eight years!
Not ready? Seriously?
It’s so much easier than you think it’s going to be. Promise.