Following one of these five diets may be the key to living longer
There is perhaps one thing that the Internet, your mom, and scientists agree on: eating lots of fruits and vegetables is good for you. But according to a new study, following any one of five diets that are rich in these foods and some others could also boost your lifespan.
By following more than 100,000 people in the U.K. for years, researchers found that people whose food choices scored high in any one of five diet categories tended to live longer than people who scored the lowest. Specifically, the team found that even after adjusting for confounding factors—such as whether people smoked, how much exercise they took, and what their education and ethnicity was—study participants who tended to eat according to any one of the five diets were 18 to 24 percent less likely to die of any cause.
For women, that roughly translated into an extra 1.5 to 2.3 years of life. And for men, it added about 1.9 to three years. The findings were published on Friday in the journal Science Advances.
The five diets that were singled out by the researchers centered on fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, and whole grains, with minimal processed foods. Fiber intake, in particular, showed a strong association with longevity, while consuming lots of sugary beverages was linked to higher all-cause mortality.
Marion Nestle, a nutrition and food studies professor emerita at New York University, says the results are not a surprise but that they add to the evidence for healthy eating.
“It’s always amazing to me that it takes research of this depth, complexity, and size to conclude that eating healthy diets is good for health and longevity,” she says.
“The study also confirms that there are lots of ways of eating healthfully, and they all work,” she adds.
The diets in the study were more academic measures than a set of eating rules like those used in popular diets such as the “keto” or “Paleo” diets. They included the following categories:
– Alternate Healthy Eating Index: A system that encourages foods known to combat chronic disease.
– Alternate Mediterranean Diet: A system that is similar to the Mediterranean diet but tweaked to incorporate foods eaten by people who live outside of the region.
– Healthful Plant-Based Diet Index: A diet-scoring mechanism that rewards plant-based eating and encourages people to consume fewer animal products.
– Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension: An eating plan that focuses on heart-healthy foods that may help lower blood pressure.
– Diabetes Risk Reduction Diet: A system that cuts back on high-glycemic foods—or foods known to rapidly raise blood sugar levels.
The researchers also considered the participants’ genetic predisposition to longevity. Interestingly, participants with higher odds of living longer tended to see less of a benefit from a healthy diet than people who were dealt a worse hand of genetic cards, notes Sofiya Milman, director of Human Longevity Studies at the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
She notes that following a healthy diet is generally a good idea regardless, however.
“This is a well-conducted association study,” says Sai Das, a professor of nutrition science at Tufts University, who was also not involved in the research. The study wasn’t a controlled experiment in which participants strictly adhered to the five diets, so it isn’t possible to say that their diets caused them to live longer. But the large sample size does add strength to the findings, she says.
“We’ve always known that diet is an important determinant of chronic disease,” Das says, adding that the diet categories in the study were “very well grounded in the science.”
There are several other limitations to the work. The study authors noted in the paper that they were not able to rule out potential confounding factors such as people’s access to health care or general “health consciousness.” And because the study was done in the U.K., it’s unclear if the findings would apply to people living in other countries.
Das recommends not sweating the specifics about how much diet adds to your lifespan. “It’s not about betting on 1.5 versus 1.7” years, she says. Instead, by adding in more healthy foods to your diet, “the point is that you are going to live longer.”
