It has been shown that eating habits have a significant impact on lifespan
What you eat has been shown to determine your lifespan. No matter where you start, good eating habits will help you live longer.
Mercedes Sotos-Pieto, an assistant professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain and an adjunct professor at Harvard School of Public Health, and his team studied how the choices we make about what we eat affect our longevity and risk of disease. No matter what age 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 for your health, a new study found .
Of course, the earlier 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 about 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. The researchers assessed diet quality 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 rich 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, rank high on foods that score high. Foods high 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.
A good diet score lowers 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, particularly.
According to Dr. Sotos-Pieto, drinking carbonated water instead of sugary drinks and eating at least a handful of nuts daily can increase your diet score by 20%. This means that you don’t have to change your entire diet to be healthy, and you can benefit from small changes, such as eating a handful of nuts for a snack or cutting down on processed meats.
Dr Sotos-Pieto said that given that most of the people in the study were over 60, it showed that it’s never too late to reap the benefits of improving your diet. The decrease in mortality among those who improved their diet was mainly due to a decrease in the incidence of cardiovascular disease, which is strongly influenced by 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’.