How does what we eat affect our healthspan and longevity? It's a complex dynamic system
According to a recent study from the Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the answer to a seemingly simple question — how does what we eat affect how we age — is unavoidably complex. While the majority of analyses had focused on the effects of a single nutrient on a single outcome, a traditional, unidimensional approach to understanding the effects of diet on health and aging no longer gives us the full picture. A healthy diet needs to be thought of based on the balance of ensembles of nutrients, rather than by optimizing a series of nutrients one at a time. Up until recently, little was understood about how dietary variety that occurs naturally in humans impacts aging. The journal BMC Biology has posted the findings online. According to Alan Cohen, PhD, associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia Mailman School, "Our ability to understand the problem has been complicated by the fact that both nutrition and the p...