In a new study from the University of Bergen, researchers found that young adults in the U.S. could add more than a decade to their life expectancy by changing their diet from a typical Western diet to an optimized diet.
The optimized diet includes more legumes, whole grains and nuts, and less red and processed meat.
For older people, the anticipated gains to life expectancy from such dietary changes would be smaller but still substantial.
Food is fundamental for health. Globally, dietary risk factors are estimated to lead to 11 million deaths and 255 million disability-adjusted life-years every year.
In the current study, the team used existing meta-analyses and data from the Global Burden of Diseases study to build a model that enables the instant estimation of the effect on life expectancy (LE) of a range of dietary changes.
The model is also now available as a publicly available online tool called the Food4HealthyLife calculator
For young adults in the United States, the model estimates that a sustained change from a typical Western diet to the optimal diet beginning at age 20 would increase life expectancy by 10.7 years for women, and 13 years for men.
The largest gains in years of life expectancy would be made by eating more legumes (females 2.2 years; males 2.5 years), more whole grains (females: 2 years; males: 2.3 years), and more nuts (females: 1.7 years; males: 2 years), less red meat (females: 1.6 years; males: 1.9 years) and less processed meat (females: 1.6 years; males: 1.9 years).
Changing from a typical diet to an optimized diet at age 60 years could still increase life expectancy by 8 years for women and 8.8 years for men.
Moreover, 80-year-olds could gain 3.4 years from such dietary changes.
The findings suggest that knowing the health potential of different food groups could help people make feasible and significant health gains. The Food4HealthyLife calculator could be a useful tool to reveal the health impact of dietary choices.
If you care about nutrition, please read studies about diet that may prevent or even reverse Alzheimer’s disease and findings of this traditional diet could reduce inflammation in the body.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about what you need to know vitamin D and COVID-19, and results showing that eating a plant-based diet at any age may lower heart disease risk.
The study was conducted by Lars T. Fadnes et al., and published in PLoS Medicine.
