A Norwegian research team has calculated that by opting at the age of 20 for an optimal diet, rich in legumes, complete cereals and fruits and vegetables, the potential gain is more than ten years.
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The link between food and health is no longer to prove. For the first time, researchers quantified how different food changes can have a substantial impact on life expectancy. In a study published Tuesday, February 8th in the magazine plos medicine , a team from the University of Bergen (Norway) has established that an “optimal diet” rich in legumes, complete cereals, hull fruits, and fruits and vegetables, and poor meat, could make earning more ten years of life expectancy to a North American individual today elderly (10.7 years for a woman, 13 years for a man) in relation to an average western diet, where The consumption of starchy, dairy and meat products is more important.
To calculate this impact, spectacular, the authors worked from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD, the “Global Charge of Diseases”), a World Epidemiology Research Program of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle (United States), to which 7,000 researchers in the world are collaborating. In 2019, the GBD teams had estimated that about 11 million premature deaths per year were attributable to poor diet, one in five deaths, more than tobacco (8 million deaths per year). GBD data has been crossed with other meta-analyzes, the most comprehensive and recent published on each category of food, for this time study, not the impact on mortality, but the more positive side: how ‘diet can save a few years of life.
“Our starting idea was to study how changes in parameters of our diet can affect health and have effects that combine between them,” explains Lars Thode Fadnes, professor at the public health school of the University of Bergen and the first author of the study. According to these results, the only fact of increasing its ration of legumes (chickpeas, beans, lentils, beans, 200 grams a day) would save a little more than two years of life expectancy at the age of 20 Years, just like eating more complete cereals (full rice, full bread, etc.) and hull fruit (up to 25 grams a day, either, for example, a walnut handle). Fruits and vegetables must always remain the main ingredients of food, but Norwegian teams feel that the consumption deficit is less important. For all the changes made, the expected gains are a little stronger in men than in women.
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