Eating habits have been shown to have a significant impact on lifespan
What you eat has been shown to determine your life span. No matter where you start from, good eating habits will help you live longer.
Mercedes Sotos-Pieto, assistant professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain and adjunct professor at Harvard School of Public Health, and her team studied how the choices we make about what we eat affect our longevity and risk. of diseases. Regardless of how old you start improving your eating habits, reducing your intake of processed foods full of salt, sugar, and other additives, and eating more nutritious foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, seafood, and whole grains can be beneficial to your health, a new study has found.
Of course, the sooner you start eating healthy, the better. Healthy eating habits from an early age significantly increase life expectancy. However, it has been found that improving eating habits after middle age can still increase lifespan.
The researchers followed around 74,000 adults between the ages of 30 and 75 for over 20 years. During that time, their diet and lifestyle were analyzed and changes in the food they consumed were recorded. Researchers assessed the quality of the diet using several scoring systems, including the Alternate Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), developed by nutrition experts at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
The index is designed to give low scores to unhealthy foods and high scores to healthy foods. Foods high in unsaturated fats and heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, whole grains and fish, avocados and olive oil, for example, are on top of the foods they get a high score. in added sugar, pizza, french fries, and other junk foods are among the low-scoring foods. The more nutritious food you eat and the less junk food you eat, the higher your score will be.
A good dietary score reduces mortality by 8%
In their analysis, the researchers found that those who scored consistently high were 14% less likely to die from any cause during the study than those who scored consistently low.
More importantly, those who improved their eating habits also saw significant benefits. Those with a 20% higher diet score had at least an 8% lower mortality rate during the study period and a 7 to 15% lower risk of dying from heart disease, in particular.
According to Dr. Sotos-Pieto, drinking carbonated water instead of sugary drinks and eating at least a handful of nuts a day can increase your diet score by 20%. This means you don’t have to change your entire diet to be healthy, and you can benefit from small changes, like eating a handful of nuts for a snack or cutting back on processed meats.
Dr Sotos-Pieto said that given that most of the people in the study were over 60, it showed that it is never too late to reap the benefits of diet improvement. The decrease in mortality among those who improved their diet was mainly due to the decrease in the incidence of cardiovascular disease, which is strongly influenced by the diet.
The results of this study were published in the “New England Journal of Medicine” under the title “Association of Changes in Diet Quality with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality”.
