Here’s how to eat to live longer, new study says
You can reduce your risk of an early death for any reason by nearly 20%, just by eating more foods from your choice of four healthy eating patterns, according to a new study.
People who more carefully followed any of the healthy eating patterns — which all share a focus on consuming more whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes — were also less likely to die from cancer, cardiovascular illness, and respiratory and neurodegenerative disease.
The results of the study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, show “there is more than one way to eat well and derive the attendant health benefits,” said Dr. David Katz, a lifestyle medicine specialist who was not involved in the study.
People often get bored with one way of eating, study coauthor Dr. Frank Hu said, “so this is good news. It means that we have a lot of flexibility in terms of creating our own healthy dietary patterns that can be tailored to individual food preferences, health conditions, and cultures.
“For example, if you are eating the healthy Mediterranean, and after a few months you want to try something different, you can switch to a DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet or you can switch to a semi-vegetarian diet,” said Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology and chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Or you can follow US dietary guidelines and create your own healthy eating plate.”
A long-term study
The study followed the eating habits of 75,000 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study and more than 44,000 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study over 36 years. None of the men and women had cardiovascular disease at the start of the study, and few were smokers. All filled out eating questionnaires every four years.
“This is one of the largest and longest-running cohort studies to examine recommended dietary patterns and the long-term risk of premature deaths and deaths from major diseases,” Hu said.
Hu and his team scored participants on how closely they followed four healthy eating styles that are in sync with current US dietary guidelines.
One is the Mediterranean diet, which stresses eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, fish, and a high amount of olive oil, Hu said. “This dietary pattern emphasizes healthy fats, especially monounsaturated fat, in addition to plant-based foods and moderate alcohol,” he said.
The next is called the healthful plant-based diet, which also focuses on eating more plant products but gives negative points for all animal products and any alcohol.
“It even discourages relatively healthy options, like fish or some dairy products,” Hu said, adding that the eating plan frowns on unhealthy plant-based foods such as potato products.
“So you can imagine that vegetarians are probably on the higher end of this diet score,” he said, “and people who eat a lot of animal products or highly processed carbohydrate foods would be at the lower end of this score.”
The Healthy Eating Index tracks whether people follow basic US nutritional guidelines, which stress healthy, plant-based foods, frown on red and processed meat, and discourage eating added sugar, unhealthy fats, and alcohol, Hu said.
The Alternate Healthy Eating Index was developed at Harvard, Hu said and uses the “best available evidence” to include foods and nutrients most strongly associated with a lower risk of chronic disease.
“We explicitly included nuts, seeds, whole grains, and lower consumption of red and processed meats and sugar-sweetened beverages,” he added. “A moderate consumption of alcohol is allowed.”
