In a recent study from the University of Michigan, researchers found eating a hot dog could cost you 36 minutes of a healthy life, while choosing to eat a serving of nuts instead could help you gain 26 minutes of healthy time alive.
They examined more than 5,800 foods, ranking them by their nutritional disease burden to humans and their impact on the environment.
The team found that substituting 10% of daily caloric intake from beef and processed meats for a mix of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, and select seafood could reduce your dietary carbon footprint by one-third and allow people to gain 48 minutes of healthy minutes per day.
The researchers base the work on a new epidemiology-based nutritional index, the Health Nutritional Index. HENI calculates the net beneficial or detrimental health burden in minutes of healthy life associated with a serving of food.
Foods with positive scores add healthy minutes of life, while foods with negative scores are associated with health outcomes that can be detrimental to human health.
To evaluate the environmental impact of foods, the researchers used IMPACT World+, a method to assess the life cycle impact of foods (production, processing, manufacturing, preparation/cooking, consumption, waste), and added improved assessments for water use and human health damages from fine particulate matter formation.
They developed scores for 18 environmental indicators taking into account detailed food recipes as well as anticipated food waste.
Finally, researchers classified food choices into three color zones: green, yellow, and red, based on their combined nutritional and environmental performances, like a traffic light.
The green zone represents foods that people are recommended to eat more of and contains foods that are both nutritionally beneficial and have low environmental impacts.
Foods in this zone are predominantly nuts, fruits, field-grown vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and some seafood.
The red zone includes foods that have either considerable nutritional or environmental consequences and that people should reduce or avoid in their diet.
Nutritional effects primarily came from processed meats, and climate and most other environmental impacts from beef and pork, lamb, and processed meats.
Based on their findings, the researchers suggest:
- Decreasing foods with the most negative health and environmental consequences, including highly processed meat, beef, shrimp, followed by pork, lamb, and greenhouse-grown vegetables.
- Increasing the most nutritionally beneficial foods, including field-grown fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts, and low-environmental impact seafood.
If you care about diets, please read studies about this diet may slow down inflammation and autoimmune diseases and findings of diet high in this nutrient may help fight against Alzheimer’s disease.
For more information about diet and your health, please see recent studies about this diet may promote healthy aging, reduce inflammation and results showing that diet alone can strongly improve older people’s health.
The study is published in Nature Food. One author of the study is Katerina Stylianou.
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