Abstract
The EAT-Lancet diet has been recently recommended for its potential health and environmental benefits. Here, leveraging data from the UK Biobank, we performed a comparative analysis to examine the associations of adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet versus traditional plant-based diets with biological aging and further assess the mediating role of metabolomic signatures specific to dietary patterns. Compared with the overall or healthful plant-based diet index, higher adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet was more strongly associated with decreased KDM-BA and PhenoAge acceleration and increased telomere length. In contrast, a higher unhealthful plant-based diet index was associated with accelerated biological aging. We identified substantial metabolomic variation in relation to different dietary patterns. The diet-specific metabolomic signatures mediated 26.9-63.0% of the associations between dietary patterns and biological aging. Our findings suggest the potential benefits of adopting the EAT-Lancet and plant-based diets in promoting healthy aging and highlight the potential of metabolomic signatures for informing personalized nutrition interventions.