According to this new study eating these healthy foods (and avoiding others) can boost your life expectancy by a decade.
Changing your diet to include more legumes, whole grains and nuts, and less red and processed meat can result in an extra decade of life, a new study found.
The new study, published last week in PLOS Medicine, used data from the Global Burden of Diseases study to create a mathematical model to estimate the effect that different dietary regimens have on life expectancy.
The model analysed how life expectancy was affected by changes in the intake of a range of foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, refined grains, nuts, legumes, fish, eggs, milk/dairy, red meat, processed meat, and sugar-sweetened beverages. An optimal diet was defined as a higher intake of whole grains, legumes, fish, fruits, vegetables, compared to a typical western diet. The optimised diet also included about a handful of nuts.
A key finding of this new modelling study is that for a young adult, a change in diet from a typical Western diet to an optimal diet, starting from the age of 20, would increase life expectancy by 10.7 years in women and 13 years in men.
The modelling study found that for older adults the benefits of following a healthy diet were slightly lower, but still significant. For someone who is 60 years old, following an optimised diet, according to this study, would result in an increase of life expectancy of 8 years for women and 8.8 years for men.
Among the different foods included in the optimised diet, the study found that legumes, whole grains and nuts led to the most gain in life expectancy. Eating more of these foods was estimated to result in a gain of 6.8 years of life expectancy for males and 5.9 years in females.
The model is also available as an online tool, accessible to anyone wanting to assess how their diet is affecting their life expectancy.
According to the authors of the study, their new findings may serve as a tool for a wide range of stakeholders. “The Food4HealthyLife calculator that we provide online could be useful for clinicians, policy makers, and laypeople to understand the health impact of dietary choices,” the authors wrote in their report.