Become ‘Younger’ with This Simple Diet Change

If you're looking to tweak your diet to look younger, you might want to try this simple diet change that experts say will help you become "younger." When I say become younger, what I mean is this diet change is supposed to help lower your biological age.

Before we get into this simple diet change that can lower your biological age, let's talk about the meaning of your biological age verses chronological age. Your chronological age, according to the experts at VeryWellHealth.com, is "the number of years you've been alive, while biological age refers to how old your cells and tissues are based on physiological evidence." So, you can't change your chronological age. It's based on the date on which you were born. But, if you're healthy, work out and have healthy habits, your biological age could be much lower than your chronological age. What's wild is that according to research from VeryWellHealth.com, "biological age is more accurate than chronological age for predicting the onset of disease and death." In contrast, your biological age has nothing to do with when you were born. It's a combination of genetics, diet, exercise, stress, sleep, smoking, environment and more to give you an entirely new age. In fact, it's possible that eventually, doctors will care more about your biological age than chronological to determine diseases, dementia and death.

So, how do you lower your biological age? Researchers and experts from the University of California, San Francisco, report that regardless of how healthy we eat, every gram of added sugar ages our cells. That doesn't make me happy, because I eat very healthy, but I also eat sweets and treats. In the study, 342 Northern California women ate 61.5 grams of added sugar per day. The participants were mainly around 40 years old. The study found that even when participants followed a heathy Mediterranean diet, the added sugar sped up biological aging.

“We knew that high levels of added sugars are linked to worsened metabolic health and early disease, possibly more than any other dietary factor," study co-senior author Elissa Epel, a UCSF professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, said in the study. "Now we know that accelerated [biological] aging is underlying this relationship, and this is likely one of many ways that excessive sugar intake limits healthy longevity." The study suggested that eating 10 less grams of added sugar a day may eventually lower your biological age by 2.4 months. Honestly, I'm going to keep eating my sugar, because 2.4 months isn't long. Of course, check with your doctor before making any changes to your diet.