Editor's Note:Subscribe to CNNEat, but better: Nyhedsbrev in Mediterranean style, an eight-part series that guides you through an expert-supported eating lifestyle that is good for your health.
CNN—
You can reduce your risk of premature death from any cause by almost 20% just by eating more foods from four healthy diets, according to a new study.
People who more carefully followed one of the healthy eating patterns – all of which share a focus on consuming more whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes – were also less likely to die from cancer, cardiovascular disease and respiratory and neurodegenerative diseases. diseases .
The results of the study,published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, shows that "there is more than one way to eat well and get the associated health benefits," said Dr. David Katz, a lifestyle medicine specialist who was not involved in the study.
People often get bored with one way of eating, said study co-author Dr. Frank Hu, "so that's good news. It means we have a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating our own healthy eating patterns that can be customized tailored to individual food preferences, health conditions and cultures.
“For example, if you eat healthy Mediterranean food and want to try something different after a few months, you can switch to a DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet, or you can switch to a semi-vegetarian diet,” Hu said, professor of nutrition and epidemiology and chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Or you can follow the U.S. dietary guidelines and create your own healthy eating plate.”
A long-term study
The study tracked the eating habits of 75,000 women who took partHealth survey among nursesand more than 44,000 men insideFollow-up research among health professionalsover 36 years. None of the men or women had cardiovascular disease at the start of the study and few were smokers. All completed meal forms every four years.
"This is one of the largest and longest-running cohort studies to investigate recommended dietary patterns and the long-term risk of premature mortality and death from serious diseases," Hu said.
Hu and his team assessed the participants on how closely they followed the four healthy eating styles that are synchronized with themCurrent US Dietary Guidelines.
One of them is the Mediterranean diet, emphasizing eating fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, fish and a large amount of olive oil, Hu said. “This diet emphasizes healthy fats, especially monounsaturated fats, in addition to plant-based foods and moderate alcohol,” he said.
The next one is called the healthy plant-based diet, which also focuses on eating more plant-based products, but gives negative points for all animal products and any alcohol.
“It discourages even relatively healthy options, such as fish or some dairy products,” Hu said, adding that the eating plan frowns on unhealthy plant foods such as potato products.
“So you can imagine that vegetarians would probably be on the higher end of this diet score,” he said, “and that people who eat a lot of animal products or highly processed carbohydrate foods would be on the lower end of this score.”
OfIndex of healthy eating tracks whether people follow basic U.S. dietary guidelines, which emphasize healthy, plant-based foods, reject red and processed meats and advise against eating added sugar, unhealthy fats and alcohol, Hu said.
OfAlternative index for healthy eatingwas 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 included nuts, seeds, whole grains and reduced consumption of red and processed meats and sugar-sweetened beverages,” he added. "Moderate alcohol consumption is permitted."
Findings in disease
After each person's eating patterns were assessed, participants were divided into five groups, or quintiles, from highest to lowest adherence to one or more of the eating patterns.
“The highest quintile of diet quality, compared to the lowest, was associated with an approximately 20% reduction in all-cause mortality,” said Katz, president and founder of the nonprofit.Real health initiative, a global coalition of experts dedicated to evidence-based lifestyle medicine.
The study also found that the risk of death from certain chronic diseases decreases as people improve their diets over time, Hu said.
Participants who improved the healthiness of their diet by 25% could reduce their risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 6% to 13% and dying from cancer by 7% to 18%, he said. It was gone up to a 7% reduction in the risk of death from neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia.
“The mortality from respiratory disease was actually much greater, reducing the risk by 35% to 46%,” Hu said.
The study was based on participants' self-reports of their food preferences and therefore only showed a correlation, and not direct cause and effect, between eating habits and health outcomes. Still, the fact that the study asked about diets every four years over such a long period strengthened the results, Hu said.
What is the outcome of this large, long-term investigation?
"It is never too late to adopt healthy eating patterns, and the benefits of eating a healthy diet can be significant in terms of reducing the number of premature deaths and various causes of premature death," Hu said.
“People also have great flexibility when it comes to creating their own healthy diets. But the common principles – eating more plant-based foods and fewer servings of red meat, processed meat, added sugars and sodium – should be there regardless what kind of diet you want to create.”
