When it comes to healthy eating, are carbohydrates good or bad? The answer, as with so many things in life, is “It depends.” A new study from researchers at Tufts University goes a long way towards clarifying what types of carbs are useful as you grow older — and which may do more harm than good, delicious though they may be.
The study, published in JAMA Network Open, sought to uncover more about a lingering topic: “[evaluating] the long-term role of dietary carbohydrate intake and carbohydrate quality in healthy aging,” as the study’s authors phrase it. To do so, they studied data from the Nurses’ Health Study, tracking the health of women from 1984 to 2016. The scientists narrowed their focus to participants who were under the age of 60 at the beginning of that period.
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What did they learn? As Tufts University scientist Andres Ardisson Korat said in a recent interview, “Our findings suggest that carbohydrate quality may be an important factor in healthy aging.
As Tufts Now’s Lisa LaPoint explained, eating refined carbohydrates and starchy food led to lower odds of what the scientists described as “healthy aging.” On the other hand, study participants who consumed dietary fiber and what LaPoint called “high-quality carbohydrates from whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes” had higher odds of experiencing healthier aging.
In an article on the study’s results for Business Insider, Gabby Landsverk pointed to one another interesting finding from it: that high-quality carbohydrates might play a larger role in healthy aging than protein. Landsverk noted that study participants who consumed five percent more protein than carbs reduced their odds of aging healthily. Taken as a whole, the study’s results offer more specifics on which foods to embrace — and which ones to avoid — as we grow older.
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