Eating a vegan diet, even for a short duration, may help you slow down the biological ageing process, finds a new study published in BMC Medicine. The study included 21 pairs of adult identical twins aged 40 on average and 77 per cent were women.
For eight weeks, one twin was asked to follow a healthy vegan diet that mostly included vegetables, legumes and fruit and the other twin a healthy omnivorous diet that included meat, egg and dairy each day. They ate meals that had been prepared for them for the first four weeks of the study, and prepared their own meals based on nutrition lessons for the second four weeks.
At the end of eight weeks, bloodwork results showed the vegan twins had aged less slowly at the cellular level than the omnivorous twins. They also observed decreases in the ages of the heart, hormone, liver and inflammatory and metabolic systems of participants who ate vegan.
The vegan twin also lost two kilograms more on average than their omnivorous twin. This was mainly due to differences in calorie content for the prepared meals eaten during the first four weeks of the study.