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Age Wise
Diet Changes That Can Add Years to Your Life
New research finds the sooner you shift eating habits, the more years you stand to gain
Surely you know by now that ditching junk food for healthier meals and snacks can save your life. But for how long? New research gets specific, pinning down how many years, on average, Americans of various ages can potentially add to their lives by nixing the typical Western diet — heavy in red meat and processed foods — in favor of a healthier way of eating that embraces beans, seeds, nuts, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
“A sustained dietary change may give substantial health gains for people of all ages both for optimized and feasible changes,” scientists write in the journal PLOS Medicine. “Gains are predicted to be larger the earlier the dietary changes are initiated in life.”
The scientists used existing data on food-related disease risk to project how much longer the average man or woman in the U.S. can expect to live by making an optimized, wholesale, sustained change in eating patterns, based on starting age:
Age 20: 11 years for women, 13 years for men
Age 60: 8 years for women, 9 years for men
Since an optimal change might not seem feasible to everyone, the longevity estimates are broken down to years of increased longevity linked to increasing intake of any one of a handful of healthier food groups and/or reducing consumption of those linked to higher rates of disease and mortality:
“The largest gains would be made by increasing the intake of legumes, whole grains, and nuts, and cutting down the consumption of red and processed meat,” says study leader Lars Fadnes, PhD, a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway who studies the connection between diet and disease.
Numerous previous studies have documented the benefits to health and longevity from choosing a healthy eating pattern. The ideal approach is often referred to as a Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes eating minimally processed food…
