Changing Your Diet Could Add Up to 13 Years to Your Life, Study Says

Small changes to our diets could reduce mortality from heart disease and cancer in ways that add 10-13 years to our lives.

Large dietary studies are often somewhat pointless, as the larger they get, the more impossible it is for them to replicate real world scenarios and represent the genetics of the people they are surveying.

However, a large meta-analysis found that if a 20-year-old woman replaces refined grains with legumes and whole grains, and increases her intake of fish and nuts, she is likely to add 10 years to her life expectancy compared with vis-a-vis heart disease. heart and cancer, while a 20-year-old man could add 13 years to his life expectancy.

Are results are based on studies that do not take into account nutritional requirements, but simply caloric intake, which precludes the well-established principle that energy restriction often equals longevity if specific nutrient needs are met.

However, with perhaps an extra decade of protection against the most common causes of death, they are findings worth investigating.

Looking at food consumption data, the researchers found that most Americans eat closer to optimal amounts of fruits and vegetables than the optimal amounts of whole grains, legumes, and nuts, and suggest increasing your intake of these foods and reducing the intake of processed grains and grain-based foods is the main driver of this increase in life expectancy.

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However, what the findings tell us about nuts, legumes, and whole grains is surprising. These complex carbohydrate sources are rich in fiber, another nutrient of concern in the United States, which can have major health impacts and cancer risks over the years.

Aside from swapping rice and pasta for more beans or lentils as a carbohydrate at dinner, there’s actually an easy rule of thumb to apply when selecting a grain to eat for breakfast and lunch. Under the “total carbohydrates” of a food will be the equal amount of both fiber and simple carbohydrates. The percentage of carbohydrates in fiber should be as high as possible.

Refined grains means that the bran, germ, covering, and other aspects of the grain that are less immediately digestible have been removed. The food does not stay intact long enough to reach the colon and large intestine, where bacterial species ferment it and produce short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate. This process is absolutely vital for the health of the GI tract, the immune system and, considering the influence of gut microbes on our mental capacity through the activity of the Vegas Nerve, our neural health as well.

CHECK: ‘Healthy Food’ Isn’t Healthy For Everyone: Get Valuable Insights About Your Gut Microbiome With The At-Home Test Kit

The elephant in the room, of course, is the call, unsurprisingly, to cut back on red and processed meats. however so 2019 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials warns that observational studies are often open to bias and difficult to control for all the confounding factors that can occur in almost infinitely variable numbers. In it, researchers from the Cochrane Centers in Spain and Poland found that of all the randomized placebo-controlled trials conducted on the consumption of red and processed meat, there is no benefit to health by limiting its consumption.

In addition, the prevalence of nutritional deficiencies of vitamin B12 could be observed, hilland iron in the United States, nutrients are found in high amounts in red meat, and the reason this new longevity finding did not control for nutrient deficiencies, red meat consumption must be maintained along with adequate exercise (or less time sitting).

Although the studies used control for exercise, it is not clear how much exercise is counted, nor is it clear sitting hours in a day, which is sometimes more important than the time spent exercising. Therefore, like other great dietary studies, they should be taken with a pinch of salt.

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