Switching to a healthier diet linked to improved longevity

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Republished by Food, Facts, and Fads. Eatwell Guide, 2016 United Kingdom

More emerging evidence suggests that improving one’s diet could help prolong a person’s life.

Poor diet and lack of physical activity are “leading global risks to health,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO)Trusted Source.

In order to improve diet globally, the WHO is working with countries to commit to a number of initiatives, including the elimination of trans fatsTrusted Source, reducing salt intakeTrusted Source and developing guidelines around food labellingTrusted Source and the use of artificial sweetenersTrusted Source.

The United Kingdom Government published its Eatwell Guide in 2016 to help people follow a healthy, balanced diet. It outlines the importance of eating at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, reducing salt and saturated fat intake, and promotes the consumption of whole grains and pulses, alongside suggestions for portion size and caloric intake.

Despite this guide being published to ensure policy in the U.K. is developed in line with these dietary aims, research published in BMJ Open suggests that less than 0.1% of the country’s population follows a diet that adheres to the guide’s recommendations.

How healthy diets impact longevity

The U.K. Biobank is a database set up in 2006 that tracks the health of half a million people, aged between 40 and 69 years, and living in the U.K. The Biobank collects data on the diets of participants, as well as on their overall health.

A recent study by a team of researchers based at the University of Bergen, Norway analysed U.K. Biobank data from over 465,000 participants to determine the impact of adherence to the diet outlined in the Eatwell Guide on their life expectancy. Its results appear in Nature Food.

Dietary patterns of participants were assessed, with intake of all food groups split into five quin tiles, from lowest to highest. Dietary patterns associated with longevity were the quin-tiles for each food group with the lowest mortality risk.

Unhealthy dietary patterns were characterized by limited amounts of whole grains, vegetables and fruits, fish, and white meat, but a high intake of red and processed meats, eggs, refined grains and sugary drinks. Outcomes were also reported based on adherence to the dietary pattern recommended by the Eatwell Guide.

Researchers adjusted the data for factors including age, sex, area-based sociodemographic deprivation, smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity level, and body mass index (BMI).

Their analysis indicated that a 40-year-old man changing his diet from an unhealthy diet to one following the Eatwell Guide dietary recommendations would add 8.9 years onto his life expectancy. For a woman of the same age, this change led to an 8.6-year increase in life expectancy.

For a 70-year-old man the change would correspond to a 4-year increase in life expectancy, and a 4.4-year increase for a woman of this age.

When these results were adjusted for BMI and energy consumption, the overall increase in life expectancy that could be attributed to improvements in diet dropped somewhat.

Meat consumption linked to higher death risk

Lead author Prof. Lars Fadnes of the University of Bergen, research group leader at Haukeland University Hospital, told Medical News Today:

“Our analyses and other research indicate that what we eat is linked to the risk of obesity, which again is a contributing risk factor to premature deaths. Our analyses could indicate that the risk for premature deaths related to overweight/obesity was about a quarter of the dietary increased risk from unhealthy eating and mortality.”

Researchers also looked at which foods had the greatest impact on decreasing the overall mortality risk.

They found that consuming more whole grains and nuts and less red meat and sugary drinks was associated with the biggest improvements in life expectancy.