Could leading a heart-healthy lifestyle affect how you age at the cellular level? A new study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association suggests that it can. What’s good for your heart may also be beneficial for your cells and the aging process. It’s one more reason to make heart-healthy choices.
The Essential 8 Habits for Heart Health
Researchers at Tufts University wanted to know how heart-healthy behaviors affect how our body ages at the cellular level. To do this they tapped into the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) – a list of health metrics that healthcare providers use to determine a person’s risk of developing cardiovascular disease. These metrics include diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, sleep duration, body mass index, blood glucose, cholesterol, and blood pressure readings.
To understand the results of this study, you’ll need a brief primer on epigenetics, the study of how environmental exposures and lifestyle factors affect gene expression. You inherit the genes that control your physical characteristics and health susceptibilities. These genes make up your DNA, your genetic blueprint.
Although these DNA sequences are fixed, unless a mutation occurs, expression of these genes is not. Whether you express certain genes can be influenced by DNA modifications. These modifications are like tags on DNA that tell the gene machinery to turn on or not turn on a gene or group of genes. One way this occurs is through DNA methylation, placing a methyl group, as a tag, on a portion of DNA.
DNA Methylation: The Cellular Timekeeper
Some people liken DNA methylation to a librarian who decides which books (genes) are accessible and easy to grab and which are tucked away on the library shelf, so you can’t easily see or access them. With DNA methylation, only certain parts of the DNA will be expressed. These methylations play a role in cellular aging due to their impact on gene expression. The ways in which DNA methylation occurs also changes as we age.
We can even use these modifications in DNA to estimate our biological age. They make up a type of epigenetic clock. You can explain the discrepancies between chronological age (your age based on when you were born) and your biological age (the age you are from a health and aging standpoint) by your epigenetic clock.
The Study: Unraveling the Heart-Aging Connection
Here comes the interesting part. For the study, researchers looked at LE8 scores on 5,682 adults over the age of fifty-six. To determine their health trajectory, they followed them for up to 14 years. Their findings? Those with higher LE8 scores, suggestive of having better cardiovascular health, also had epigenetic scores suggestive of a younger biological age. For every 13-point increase in a participant’s Life’s Essential 8 score, the risk of developing cardiovascular disease for the first time was reduced by about 35%.
Another encouraging finding is that participants who had higher LE8 scores had a lower risk of developing or dying from cardiovascular disease. No surprise here. But they also had lower mortality from all causes. The findings suggest that adopting heart health habits and controlling risk factors for heart disease slow aging itself.
The Genetic Wild Card
We all age at differing rates based on our genetics and lifestyle. In the study, subjects who were genetically predisposed to more rapid aging benefited most from adopting a healthy lifestyle and controlling risk factors for heart disease based on the LE8 criteria. So, there are benefits to leading a heart-healthy lifestyle that extend beyond your heart and to aging process itself. The more predisposed you are to aging rapidly, the more you’re likely to benefit from controlling your risk factors for heart disease.
Unfortunately, science shows, at this point, you can’t change the hand nature dealt you (your DNA), but you can modify its expression. So, you have the power to lower your risk of heart disease through lifestyle by managing your risk factors. The research also shows that this slows the rate of which you age too. Aging isn’t a solo act dictated by your genes or DNA. Instead, it’s an intricate interplay between genes you were born with and the habits you engage in every day.
The key to heart health and aging slower lies with the choices you make in the kitchen, how active you are, and how well you control factors like your blood glucose level, blood lipids, and blood pressure.
A Call to Action: Small Steps, Big Impact
Change is always hard. But one reason lifestyle changes challenge us is that we try to take on too much too fast. So, tackle a heart-healthy lifestyle in small steps. For example, diet is one of the LE8 factors. According to research, the Mediterranean diet is a proven way to support heart health and may have anti-aging benefits itself. But you don’t have to revamp your diet in one swoop.
Take small steps. For example, switch the processed oils in your cabinet for extra-virgin olive oil, a staple of the Mediterranean diet. Make nuts and seeds your go-to snack and replace one starch on your plate with a veggie each week. Keep tackling lifestyle habits on the LE8 list one step at a time.
Also, make sure you’re seeing your doctor, so they can monitor factors on the list, like your lipids and blood sugar. Invest in the equipment to monitor your blood pressure at home. Make it your goal, overtime, to get these parameters into the normal range. You’re not just doing it for heart health, it’s to slow the aging process and help you stay more functional. As they say, it’s not just about adding years to our life, but life to our years.
References:
- Niechcial MA, Vaportzis E, Gow AJ. Genes Versus Lifestyles: Exploring Beliefs About the Determinants of Cognitive Ageing. Front Psychol. 2022 Mar 4;13:838323. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.838323. PMID: 35310240; PMCID: PMC8931720.
- “Heart Healthy Behaviors May Help Reverse Rapid Cell Aging,” 2024. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/05/240529144017.htm.
- Horne, Justine, Janet Madill, Colleen O’Connor, Jacob Shelley, and Jason Gilliland. “A Systematic Review of Genetic Testing and Lifestyle Behaviour Change: Are We Using High-Quality Genetic Interventions and Considering Behaviour Change Theory?” Lifestyle Genomics 11, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 49–63. https://doi.org/10.1159/000488086.
- Hernandez, Lyla M, Dan G Blazer, and in Health. “Genetics and Health.” Nih.gov. National Academies Press (US), 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK19932/.
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