Skip to main content
NUTRITION 2023 Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Back

Session: Nutrition-related Factors in Aging and Chronic Disease (Poster Theater Flash Session 7)

(PTFS07-06-23) Dietary Patterns and Epigenetic Aging in the Women’s Health Initiative

Monday, July 24, 2023
8:21 AM – 8:25 AM ET
Location:  Fairfax
Disclosure(s):
Lindsay M. Reynolds, PhD: No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.
Denise K. Houston, PhD, RDN: Dairy Management, Inc.: Speaker/Speaker's Bureau (Terminated, November 9, 2022)
Objectives: To better understand the biological mechanisms that may underlie the impact of diet on health, we computed associations between adherence to healthy dietary patterns and epigenetic age acceleration.

Methods: We leveraged data from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), including baseline food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) and baseline DNA methylation (DNAm) measures from peripheral blood in 4,583 postmenopausal women aged 50–79 years. Using the FFQ data, we calculated adherence to three healthy dietary patterns: 1) Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2015), 2) Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, and 3) alternate Mediterranean (aMED) diet. Using DNAm data generated using the HumanMethylation450 Beadchip, we calculated four epigenetic age acceleration (AgeAccel) measures. Linear mixed models adjusted for race, education, smoking, physical activity, WHI sub-study from which methylation data were obtained (random and fixed effect), and DNAm-based estimates of leukocyte proportions.

Results: The three healthy dietary patterns were most strongly inversely associated with phenotypically-tuned epigenetic age acceleration measure AgeAccel Pheno (HEI-2015: Beta ± SE = -0.035 ± 0.009, p = 1.16E-04; DASH: Beta ± SE = -0.08 ± 0.02, p= 7.55E-05; aMED: Beta ± SE = -0.14 ± 0.06, p = 1.06E-02). Greater adherence to HEI-2015 was inversely associated with chronological age-tuned measures of AgeAccel (Hannum: p = 8.43E-03; Horvath: p = 1.68E-02), though not as strongly as associations with phenotypically-tuned measures of AgeAccel (Pheno: p = 1.16E-04; Grim: p = 3.90E-03). The dietary pattern component most strongly associated with AgeAccel Pheno was the fatty acid intake ratio [(PUFA + MUFA)/ SFA] for HEI-2015 (Beta ± SE = -0.12 ± 0.05, p = 9.34E-03), lower sodium for DASH (Beta ± SE = -0.26 ± 0.09, p = 6.44E-03), and lower red and processed meat intake for aMED (Beta ± SE= -0.65 ± 0.19, p= 6.16E-04).

Conclusions: In postmenopausal women, adherence to healthy dietary patterns was inversely associated with DNA methylation-based measures of biological age, including both chronologically- and phenotypically-tuned measures of epigenetic age.

Funding Sources: This work was supported by NHLBI, NIA, NIH and US DHHS. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.