Fascinating research into twins reveals what happens to their brains when one eats healthily and the other doesn’t
Right from your school days, you are told to eat a balanced meal every day, but what actually happens when you do?
A new study on twins could be one of the best indicators yet, at least when it comes to mental health.
Researchers followed more than 1,700 pairs of older twins for 11 years, examining their fruit and vegetable intake, health, body weight and mental well-being.
The researchers found that those who ate less fresh food were more likely to become depressed. This was the case even after researchers took into account other factors such as age, gender, education level, their living situation and BMI.
Dr. Annabel Matison, lead author of the study, said simple nutritional recommendations could help the 21 million Americans with depression fight back against their condition, in addition to counseling or medication.
“The findings provide another argument for increasing fruit and vegetable intake in adults over 45 years of age,” she said.
Doctors consider twin studies to be the gold standard for research because you have two participants with virtually identical DNA that you can study at the same time, explains Dr. Karen Mather, co-author of the study.
Similar to the fruit and vegetable study, a separate 2024 study showed the difference in twins who received very few Botox injections – Figure A – next to twins who received regular Botox – Figure D
Dr. Mather said: ‘One of the advantages of the twin design is that it can help address the problem of undesirable factors, such as socio-economic status at a young age, influencing outcomes.’
This was done to investigate everything from intelligence to aging. A study published earlier this year looked at how using Botox as you age can prevent wrinkles by comparing identical twins.
That’s why researchers from the University of New South Wales looked at twins for their study and published their findings in the magazine Scientific Reports.
It included data from four different international twin studies.
They took place in the US, Denmark, Australia and Sweden. Each study included slightly different measurements; for example, some did not track weight over time.
All 3,483 study participants were over the age of 45 at baseline, in an effort to determine how diet affects people later in life, as most studies on the topic have focused on younger people.
They asked each group about their daily eating habits and sorted them into groups based on how often they ate fruits such as bananas, oranges, apples and pears, and how often they ate salads, cooked vegetables and raw vegetables.
They included potato intake as a separate measure.
They also measured their depression symptoms, using the surveys conducted in each of the four different studies.
In every group included in the review, higher fruit and vegetable intake was associated with better mental health. They did not calculate a figure explaining how much fruit and vegetable intake had an effect on mental health.
They adjusted the data for factors such as age, gender, education, partnership and BMI, when the studies included that measurement.
They found that these factors had little impact on the data and said: ‘thThe addition of BMI, physical health and cognitive skills to the model had minimal impact on the results. This suggests that the exclusion of participants is unlikely to have affected the results.”
The researchers suggested that better nutrition has a number of benefits for brain health. First, increasing vitamins and fiber helps nourish the entire body and maintain healthy blood flow to the brain.
On the other hand, eating fresh food can keep bacteria in the gut healthy, they said, which could play a role in suppressing the mind.
Dr. Matison said: ‘The importance of the gut microbiome and its potential impact on depression due to inflammation, both systemic and neuroinflammation, is increasingly well understood.’