You may reduce the risk of premature death for any reason by almost 20%, only eating more foods of your choice among four healthy eating patterns according to a new study.
The people who most carefully followed any of the healthy eating patterns – who share a focus on consuming more whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes – were also less likely to die from cancer, cardiovascular, respiratory and neurodegenerative diseases.
The study results, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, show that “there’s more than one way to eat well and get the corresponding health benefits,” said David Katz, a lifestyle medicine expert who was not involved in the study.
People are often bored with one way of eating, said study co-author Frank Hu. “So this is good news. This means that we have a lot of flexibility in terms of creating our own healthy eating patterns that can be adapted to individual foods and preferences, health conditions and cultures.
“For example, if you are eating a healthy Mediterranean diet and after a few months you want to try something different, you can switch to a DASH (Dietary Approaches to Control Hypertension) diet or you can switch to a semi-vegetarian diet,” said Hu, Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and Chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Or you can follow US dietary guidelines and create your own healthy eating dish.”
long term study
The study tracked the eating habits of 75,000 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study and more than 44,000 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study over 36 years. None of the men and women had cardiovascular disease at baseline and few were smokers. All completed dietary questionnaires every four years.
“This is one of the largest and longest cohort studies to examine recommended dietary patterns and the long-term risk of premature deaths and deaths from serious illnesses,” said Hu.
Hu and his team scored participants on how well they followed four healthy eating styles that are in sync with current US dietary guidelines.
One is the mediterranean diet , which emphasizes eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, fish and a lot of olive oil, Hu said. “This eating pattern emphasizes healthy fats, especially monounsaturated fats, along with plant-based foods and moderate alcohol,” he said.
The next one is called healthy plant based diet which also focuses on eating more plant products, but gives minuses for all animal products and any alcohol.
“It even discourages relatively healthy options like fish or some dairy products,” Hu said, adding that the eating plan disapproves of unhealthy foods plant-based products such as potato-based products.
“So you can imagine that vegetarians would probably be on the upper end of that diet score,” he said, “and people who eat a lot of animal products or highly processed carbohydrate foods would be on the lower end of that score.”
THE Healthy Eating Index tracks whether people follow basic U.S. dietary guidelines, which emphasize healthy plant-based foods, frown on red and processed meat, and discourage consumption of added sugar, unhealthy fats and alcohol, Hu said.
The Alternative Health Eating Index was developed at Harvard, Hu said, and uses the “best available evidence” to include foods and nutrients most strongly associated with a lower risk of chronic disease.
“We explicitly include nuts, seeds, whole grains and lower consumption of red and processed meats and sugary drinks,” he added. “A moderate consumption of alcohol is allowed”.
Findings due to illness
After scoring each person’s dietary pattern, participants were divided into five groups, or quintiles, from highest to lowest adherence to one or more of the dietary patterns.
“The highest quintile of diet quality compared to the lowest was associated with about a 20% reduction in all-cause mortality,” said Katz, president and founder of the True Health Initiative, a global coalition of experts dedicated to to the evidence-based medicinal lifestyle.
The study also found reductions in the risk of dying from some chronic diseases if people improved their diet over time, Hu said.
Participants who improved health of your diet by 25% could reduce the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease in a range of 6% to 13% and dying of cancer in 7% to 18%, he said. There was a reduction of up to 7% in the risk of death from neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia.
“The reduction in respiratory disease mortality was actually much greater, reducing the risk by 35% to 46%,” Hu said.
The study relied on participants’ own reports of dietary preferences and therefore only showed an association, not direct cause and effect, between dietary habits and health outcomes. Still, the fact that the study asked about diets every four years over such a long period added weight to the findings, Hu said.
What is the conclusion of this large long-term study?
“It’s never too late to adopt healthy eating patterns, and the benefits of a healthy diet can be substantial in terms of reducing total premature deaths and different causes of premature death,” said Hu.
“People also have a lot of flexibility in terms of creating their own healthy eating pattern. But the common principles — eating more plant-based foods and fewer servings of red meat, processed meats, added sugar and sodium — should be there no matter what kind of diet you want to create.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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