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• Posted August 7, 2026

Short-Term Vegan Diet Linked To Lower Inflammation And Aging

Switching to a vegan diet for even a short time can reduce inflammation and slow aging on a cellular level, a new study says.

People who adopted a vegan diet for just one month experienced changes in genetic expression that promoted lower inflammation and slower aging compared to those eating a meat-rich diet, researchers reported Aug. 3 in the journal MedComm.

“Our genes are not our destiny,” said researcher Jerome Mertens, an associate professor of neurosciences at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine.

“The remarkable finding isn’t simply that one diet outperformed another,” Mertens said in a news release. “It’s that the epigenome responded measurably in just four weeks, showing that our biology is far more dynamic — and responsive to everyday choices — than we often assume.”

For the study, researchers randomly assigned 48 healthy adults to eat either a vegan diet or a meat-rich diet for one month. Both diets provided similar calorie intake.

The team then analyzed more than 800,000 sites across the human genome at which methylation — the process that turns genes on or off — takes place.

Results showed the vegan diet shifted the immune system toward a less inflammatory state, promoting lower levels of inflammation-driving cells and higher levels of cells that regulate immune response.

These genetic changes closely matched the content of patients' blood samples, researchers said.

“That agreement told us we weren’t just seeing changes on a computer screen — we were detecting real and meaningful biological changes,” lead researcher Lukas Karbacher said in a news release. He’s a UC San Diego School of Medicine neuroscience graduate student.

The vegan diet also appeared to reduce activity in genes involved in cancer-related pathways, and promoted other genetic activity that could lower cholesterol, improve insulin response and boost DNA repair response.

What’s more, the vegan diet appeared to decelerate biological aging during the one-month study period, researchers said.

“These findings reinforce the idea that not all measures of biological aging capture the same biology,” Mertens said. “The clocks associated with disease risk and overall health consistently pointed in the same direction, suggesting the dietary changes were influencing pathways tied to health rather than simply the passage of time.”

However, because the study was relatively small and the gene changes modest, larger and longer studies will be needed to show whether or not a vegan diet would actually cause a reduction in disease risk.

“Our study adds to growing evidence that nutrition can shape biology at the molecular level,” co-senior author Dr. Max Storz said in a news release. He is a clinician at University of Freiburg Medical Center in Germany.

“The next step is to understand whether these epigenetic changes persist over time and whether they translate into meaningful improvements in long-term health,” Storz said. “That will require larger clinical studies, but these findings provide an important foundation.”

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more on biological aging.

SOURCE: University of California-San Diego, news release, Aug. 4, 2026