FRIDAY, Sept. 18, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Healthy eating might help slow the speed at which you age, and there’s more than one diet that works, a new study says.

Ten different healthy dietary patterns are linked to slower biological aging, researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Communications.

People’s DNA showed fewer age-related changes if they followed any of these healthy diets, researchers found.

“Our study suggests that healthy eating goes hand in hand with slower biological aging,” senior researcher Dr. Monique Breteler said in a news release. She is the director of population health sciences at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn, Germany. 

“The effects are not massive, but they are measurable and relevant for prevention,” Breteler said. “By slowing the aging process, the risk of age-related diseases such as dementia or cardiovascular disorders can be reduced. Thus, healthy eating contributes to healthy aging.”

Biological age reflects the wear-and-tear of daily living on a person’s body, and is different from the age reflected by their birthday.

To see how diet might affect biological aging, researchers analyzed blood samples of 7,500 people and quizzed them about their eating habits.

“We applied three different approaches, so-called epigenetic clocks, to read biological aging,” lead researcher Juliana Tavares said. She is a doctoral researcher at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases.

“To this end, we leveraged state-of-the-art technology, which allowed us to cover about 850,000 sites in the DNA,” she said in a news release. “This is roughly twice as many as in most previous studies.”

The team examined how well each person’s dietary pattern aligned with 10 established healthy diets, including the Mediterranean, Nordic and DASH diets, as well as a plant-based diet.

“One and the same person could therefore rank high on one diet score and low on another,” Tavares said. “In other words: People who ate healthily by one standard were often not the same people who ate healthily by another. According to our data, hardly anyone counts as a healthy eater by every standard at once.”

Despite this, better diet quality was associated across the board with slower biological aging, applying to all 10 diets examined.

“While there are measurably differences between the diets, they are modest in absolute terms. It’s the big picture that matters,” Tavares said. “In summary: When it comes to slowing down the aging process, there isn’t just one healthy diet, but indeed a whole repertoire of possible diets with a positive effect.”

Interestingly, smokers got the most out of a healthy diet, researchers found.

“Smoking is very harmful to health,” Tavares said. “One explanation for our findings might be that there is just more health benefit to gain for smokers by eating healthy because of the enormous detrimental effects of smoking.”

Researchers also found there was substantial overlap in the way diets affected a person’s genetics and aging.

“More than 70% of the affected biological pathways were shared across all diets,” Tavares said. “These involve cell structure, cell signaling and metabolism — processes central to aging and chronic disease. Therefore, it is understandable that the dietary patterns we examined were all linked with a slowing of biological aging.”

A few pathways were diet-specific, matching each diet’s main objectives, Tavares added. For instance,  heart-related pathways were unique to the DASH diet, and pathways related to cognition and memory were unique to the so-called MIND diet, which aims to support brain health.  

“You don't need a perfect diet — that may be the most practical message here," Tavares said.

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more about biological aging.

SOURCE: German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, news release, Sept. 15, 2026