What this means
Researchers compared ten healthy diet scores and how they relate to DNA aging markers. Eating a healthy pattern was linked to less epigenetic aging, but the size of the link varied by score.
Plain-English summary written by an AI model from the abstract. The original is below.
- Who it was tested in
- People
- Kind of research
- A study
The science
- Original title
- Associations between diet quality, epigenetic aging and epigenome in two population-based cohorts.
- Authors
- Tavares JF, Liu D, Talevi V et al.
- Journal
- Nature communications
- Published
- Aug 29, 2026
- Study type
- Study · in humans
- PMID
- 42668319 ↗
Abstract
Several dietary patterns have been associated with better health outcomes. However, the extent to which adherence to different so-called healthy diets overlaps, whether these dietary patterns are equally beneficial, and whether they are associated with similar DNA methylation profiles, remains unclear. Therefore, we investigate the overlap in adherence to ten diet quality scores, and examine the associations of these scores with both biological aging markers and DNA methylation profiles. We use data from the Rhineland Study, a large population-based cohort, and validated our findings using corresponding data from the EPIC-Potsdam cohort. Here, we show minimal overlap of participants classified in the highest quartile (top 25%) of adherence across different diet quality scores. Adherence to a healthy dietary pattern is associated with reduced epigenetic aging, although associations differed in magnitude across diet quality scores. Different dietary patterns are associated with distinct methylation profiles, which however largely converged onto the same biological pathways. Our findings suggest that general adherence to a healthy dietary pattern could promote health through similar epigenetic mechanisms, despite variations in dietary composition.
Tavares JF, Liu D, Talevi V et al. Associations between diet quality, epigenetic aging and epigenome in two population-based cohorts. Nature communications. 2026. doi:10.1038/s41467-026-77064-4. PMID: 42668319. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42668319/
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