According to a study, changing your diet can extend your life by up to 13 years

According to a new study, changing your diet can add up to 13 years to your life, especially if you start while you’re young.

The study produced a model of what would happen to a person’s longevity if they switched from a “typical Western diet” of red meat and processed foods to a “optimised diet” of fruits and vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and nuts.

According to a study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine, if a woman started eating properly at the age of 20, she could live an extra 10 years. A man who begins eating a healthy diet at the age of 20 can expect to live an additional 13 years.

According to the study, focusing on a healthy diet could help older persons live longer lives. A lady may extend her life by eight years if she began at the age of 60. Beginning a healthy diet at the age of 60 might add roughly nine years to a man’s life.

According to the study, a plant-based eating pattern could even help 80-year-olds: dietary adjustments could add 3.5 years to men’s and women’s lives.

Specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine and nutrition who was not involved in the study, said, “The notion that improving diet quality would reduce the risk of chronic disease and premature death is long established, and it only stands to reason that less chronic disease and premature death means more life expectancy.”

Katz, the president and founder of the nonprofit True Health Initiative, a global coalition of specialists committed to evidence-based lifestyle medicine, has published research on the use of food as a preventive medication.

“What they define as an ‘optimal’ diet is not quite optimal; it’s just a whole lot better than ‘typical,'” Katz explained, adding that diet might be “further improved, conferring even greater benefits.”

“My impression is that their ‘much improved’ diet still allowed for considerable doses of meat and dairy,” Katz said, adding that “these elements are at quite low levels in the top tier” when his team evaluates diet quality objectively.

A life-extension model

Researchers from Norway used previous meta-analyses and data from the Global Burden of Disease project, a database that tracks 286 causes of death, 369 diseases and injuries, and 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories throughout the world, to forecast the future impact of a person’s diet change.

The study discovered that consuming more legumes, such as beans, peas, and lentils; whole grains, which are a plant’s entire seed; and nuts, such as walnuts, almonds, pecans, and pistachios, resulted in the greatest increases in longevity.

Adding more plants and grains to your diet may seem simple, but data reveal that Americans struggle to do so. Few Americans meet their daily fruit and vegetable standards, according to a new research from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Only 12% of adults consume 112 to 2 cups of fruit each day, as suggested by the federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, according to the CDC report. Only 10% of Americans, including legumes, consume the recommended 2 to 3 cups of veggies per day.

According to the current Dietary Guidelines for Americans, about half of all grain consumption should be whole grains, but over 95 percent of Americans fail to meet this target, opting instead for processed grains, which have been milled to remove the grain, bran, and many minerals, including fibre.

According to the standards, more than half of Americans do not consume the necessary 5 grammes (approximately a teaspoon) of nuts and seeds each day.

More than simply protein can be found in nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains. Healthy fats, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidant “phytochemicals” have all been linked to a reduced risk of chronic diseases.

Meats, both red and processed

Longer life was also connected to eating less red and processed meat, such as bacon, sausage, and preserved deli meats.

That is reasonable: Red and processed meats have been related to serious health problems such as heart disease and bowel cancer.

In a previous interview, Oxford University epidemiologist Tim Key, a member of the UK Department of Health’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, said, “There’s substantial evidence that processed meat can cause bowel cancer — so much so that the World Health Organization has classified it as carcinogenic since 2015.”

Experts advise that replacing lean poultry, fish, and plant proteins for red and processed meats is one method to improve one’s diet quickly.

Soybeans (edamame), chickpeas, lentils, and other legumes, tofu, tempeh, nuts, seeds, and whole grains like quinoa are all good sources of plant protein. Broccoli, for example, has a higher protein content than other vegetables.

People who ate the most plant protein were 27 percent less likely to die of any cause and 29 percent less likely to die of coronary heart disease than people who ate the least amount of plant protein, according to a 2020 research of more than 37,000 middle-aged Americans.

In a previous interview, research coauthor Dr. Frank Hu, chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said, “The benefit is more pronounced when red and processed meats are replaced by plant protein sources.”

What you can do to improve your diet

The Mediterranean diet, which has earned best diet five years in a row, is one method to incorporate more plants into your diet while consuming less red meat, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The DASH diet, which stands for dietary approaches to control hypertension, and the Flexitarian diet, which emphasises being a vegetarian for the most of the time, were tied for second place. All of these diets emphasise fruits, vegetables, beans, lentils, whole grains, nuts, and seeds in their meals.

Cooking one meal a week focused on beans, whole grains, and veggies, with herbs and spices to add punch, is an easy way to start eating the Mediterranean way. When one night a week is easy, increase to two and so on.