With the endless array of complex supplements promoted by influencers and podcast hosts, it often feels like the only way to stay healthy into old age is by relying on an expanding medicine cabinet. However, a new study suggests just one supplement could have a real impact on your longevity: omega-3. Regularly taking capsules of the fatty acid, it turns out, could slow your ageing down by as much as four months.
Your biological age is a more accurate predictor of lifespan than your chronological age. Unlike the number of birthdays you've celebrated, biological age reflects the rate of change in your DNA, which can vary from person to person.
For the study, published in journal Nature Ageing, an international team of researchers compared the effects of omega-3 intake against vitamin D intake and regular exercise in over 700 adults aged over 70.
Over the course of three years, the participants – who all lived in Switzerland – were given one of eight combinations of treatments: taking 1g of omega-3 per day, and/or 30mg of vitamin D per day, and/or exercising for 30 minutes three times a week – or none of the treatments (the control group).
During this time the researchers took blood samples and used different epigenetic ‘clocks’ to find out the participants’ rates of ageing. These clocks are not the ones you find hanging on walls, but rather tools that can locate and track the signatures of ageing in your cells – giving you an overall indicator of health and longevity.
At the end of the trial, three of the four clocks revealed that the biological age of the participants taking omega-3 was reduced by four months. In previous studies, the same team showed that the supplement reduced signs of ageing when combined with either vitamin D or exercise. The strongest results happened when all three were combined, which was found to lower cancer risk and prevent frailty in participants.
One of the four biological clocks confirmed these benefits, showing biological age slowing when participants exercised and took both supplements.
“It’s exciting to see these results showing the benefits of omega-3, vitamin D and exercise on ageing,” said Dr Mary Ni Lochlainn, a post-doctoral research fellow in geriatric medicine at King’s College London who was not involved in the study.
“While the study was focused on healthy and active older adults, and led to a relatively small improvement in their ageing-biological-clocks, it adds to the growing evidence that these simple and fairly low-cost interventions are beneficial and, based on this and previous existing research, worth engaging in for adults as they get older.”
But not all experts agree on how useful these early trial results are. One of the reasons is that, as the paper’s authors point out, all current studies on ageing are restricted by the absence of a standardised test for biological ageing.
“I think it makes good sense to look at several clocks, but we have to take into account that they give different information about the effect of the treatments in the trial, and it’s not possible to say that the findings from one biological clock are better than those from another clock,” said Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics at the Open University, who was also not involved in the study.
McConway also noted that the researchers acknowledge that they don’t have “data on long-term survival rates of the people in the study.” He added: “We can’t say whether the effect on biological ageing clocks will continue after three years, because that wasn’t studied.
“This study is an interesting start, but there’s so much that it can’t tell us.”
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