Changing your diet could add up to 13 years to your life, study says.
By Sandee LaMotte
“Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.”
~ Hippocrates. The Famous Father of Medicine.
Changing what you eat:
Could add up to 13 years to your life, according to a newly published study,
especially if you start when you are young.
The study created a model of what might happen to a man or woman’s longevity
if they replaced a “typical Western diet” focused on red meat and processed foods
with an “optimized diet” focused on eating less red and processed meat and more
fruits and vegetables, legumes, whole grains and nuts.
If a woman began eating optimally at age 20, she could increase her lifespan by
just over 10 years, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine. A man eating the healthier diet from age 20 could add 13 years to his life.
Focusing on a healthier diet:
Could also lengthen the lives of older adults, the study said.
By starting at age 60, a woman could still increase her lifespan by eight years.
Men starting a healthier diet at age 60 might add nearly nine years to their lives.
A plant-based eating style could even benefit 80-year-olds, the study said:
Men and women could gain about 3.5 years of extra life from dietary changes.
“The notion that improving diet quality would reduce the risk of chronic disease and premature death is long established, and it only stands to reason that less chronic disease and premature death means more life expectancy,” said Dr. David Katz, a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine and nutrition, who was not involved in the study.
Katz, the president and founder of the nonprofit True Health Initiative, a global coalition of experts dedicated to evidence-based lifestyle medicine, has published research on how to use food as preventive medicine.
“What they define as an ‘optimal’ diet is not quite optimal; it’s just a whole lot better than ‘typical,'” Katz said, adding that he felt diet could be “further improved, conferring even greater benefits.”
“My impression is that their ‘much improved’ diet still allowed for considerable doses
of meat and dairy,” Katz said, adding that when his team scores diet quality objectively, “these elements are at quite low levels in the top tier.”
To model the future impact of a person’s change of diet, researchers from Norway used existing meta-analyses and data from the Global Burden of Disease study, a database that tracks 286 causes of death, 369 diseases and injuries, and 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories around the world.
The largest gains in longevity were found from eating more legumes, which include beans, peas and lentils; whole grains, which are the entire seed of a plant; and nuts such as walnuts, almonds, pecans and pistachios, the study found.
It may sound simple to add more plants and grains to your diet, but statistics show that Americans struggle to do so. A new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found few Americans eat close to their daily recommendations of fruits and vegetables.
The CDC study found that only 12% of adults consume 1½ to 2 cups of fruit each day, which is the amount recommended by the federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Only 10% of Americans eat the recommended 2 to 3 cups of vegetables each day,
including legumes.
About 50% of grain consumption should be whole grains, yet over 95% of Americans fail
to meet that goal, according to the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans, instead eating processed grains, which have been milled to remove the grain, bran and many nutrients, including fiber.
Over 50% of Americans fail to eat the 5 grams (about a teaspoon) of recommended nuts and seeds each day, the guidelines said. Nuts, seeds, legumes and whole grains contain more than just protein. They include healthy fats, vitamins, minerals and antioxidant “phytochemicals” that have been associated with lower risk of chronic diseases.
Red and processed meats:
Eating less red and processed meat such as bacon, sausage and preserved deli meats was also linked to longer life. That makes good sense: Red and processed meats have been linked to significant health risks, including coronary heart disease and bowel cancer.
“There’s substantial evidence that processed meat can cause bowel cancer — so much
so that the World Health Organization has classified it as carcinogenic since 2015.”
Oxford University epidemiologist Tim Key, a member of the UK Department of Health’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, told CNN in a prior interview.
Replacing red and processed meats with lean poultry, fish and plant proteins
is one way to improve a diet quickly, experts say.
Plant proteins include soybeans (edamame), chickpeas, lentils and other legumes,
tofu, tempeh, nuts, seeds, and whole grains like quinoa. Some vegetables, like broccoli, also contain higher levels of protein.
A 2020 study which tracked more than 37,000 middle-aged Americans found those
who ate the most plant protein was 27% less likely to die of any cause and 29% less likely to die of coronary heart disease than people who ate the least amount of plant protein.
“The benefit is more pronounced when red and processed meats are replaced by plant protein sources,” study coauthor Dr. Frank Hu, chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told CNN in a prior interview.
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How to improve your diet:
One way to incorporate more plants into your diet and consume less red meat
is with the Mediterranean diet, which has won best diet five years in a row,
according to U.S. News & World Report.
Tied for silver was the DASH diet, which stands for dietary approaches to stop hypertension, and the Flexitarian diet, which encourages being a vegetarian most
of the time. All of these diets focus on meals full of fruits, vegetables, beans, lentils,
whole grains, nuts and seeds.
An easy way to start eating the Mediterranean way is to cook one meal each week
based on beans, whole grains and vegetables, using herbs and spices to add punch.
Want to lose weight from sleeping? Try extending your sleep time so you are not sleep deprived.
That’s the startling outcome of a randomized trial that asked young,
overweight adults who typically slept less than six and a half hours to try to sleep about eight and a half hours a night for two weeks.
At the end of that short amount of time, many of those who did extend their sleep
to a healthier length decreased their calorie intake by an average of 270 calories a day, according to the study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
Some of the study participants cut their intake by 500 calories each day, the study found.
“This is almost like a game changer for weight loss or weight maintenance,” said study author Dr. Esra Tasali, an associate professor of medicine who directs the Sleep Research Center at the University of Chicago.
The researchers projected their findings into the future.
They found that eating 270 fewer calories a day would translate to a loss of 26 pounds over three years, all by doing nothing more than getting additional sleep. “A small intervention you can do to yourself to increase or preserve your sleep duration so you are not sleep deprived can have a significant impact on healthy weight,” Tasali said.
One of the strengths of the study:
Was the fact that it happened in a real-world setting, not a sleep lab, and used an objective urine test to measure calories instead of relying on people’s recall of what they ate.
“This is a very well-done study answering an important question,” said Dr. Bhanuprakash Kolla, a sleep psychiatrist and neurologist in the Center for Sleep Medicine and the Division of Addiction Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
He was not involved in the study.
“They clearly showed that as you increase the amount of sleep, energy intake reduced
and this in turn led to modest reductions in weight,” Kolla said. “It is likely that if this
were extended, there could be more significant changes in weight.”
Sleep and hunger are related:
Just how does sleeping longer help you lose weight? One reason is the impact
lack of sleep has on two key hormones that control hunger and satiety: ghrelin and leptin.
Ghrelin stimulates hunger and has been shown to increase with sleep deprivation.
Its partner, leptin, tells us when we are full.
“Leptin has been shown to decrease with sleep restriction.
Therefore, when we are sleep deprived, we have less of this hormone and therefore less of a brake on our appetite,”
Kolla said. It’s not just people who are overweight who find themselves craving carbs and adding pounds when they are sleep deprived, said Kristen Knutson, an associate professor of sleep and preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.
“Studies that observed increased appetite after sleep loss were in people who were not overweight. Getting sufficient sleep has health benefits for everyone regardless of body weight,” Knutson said.
Another way poor sleep impacts our eating choices can be found in the brain’s reward centers, the spot that gives us pleasurable feelings we want to repeat.
“The reward centers in the brain get more activated when you are sleep deprived, which increases your craving for carbohydrates or junk food or a higher overall food intake,” Tasali said. Then there’s the problem of insulin resistance, which increases with sleep deprivation and leads to weight gain.
“Several laboratory studies have shown that if you were to do a sugar tolerance test in
the morning to sleep-deprived individual versus well-rested individual, you would see
a pre-diabetic, insulin-resistant state in the morning,” Tasali said.
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An easy intervention:
How difficult was it for people to add more sleep to their lives?
Not that hard at all, Tasali said. Each person underwent an hour-long counseling session about their sleeping style.
“It was very personalized, focused on trying to review people’s lifestyles, their work-related limitations, their family members, their pets, children and bedtime routines,” she said. “Then we talked to them about improving their sleep hygiene, such as putting away electronics before bed.” That’s because blue light stops the release of melatonin, the body’s sleepy time hormone. Sleep experts advise that any blue light emitting devices — smartphones, laptops and televisions, to name a few — be put away 45 minutes to an hour before bed.
Other sleep hygiene tips include:
Sleeping in a cool bedroom (about 60 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 to 20 degrees Celsius); skipping spicy food and alcohol before bed; dampening sounds; and having a soothing bedtime ritual, which could include taking a warm bath or shower, reading a book, listening to soothing music, deep breathing, yoga, meditation, or light stretches.
Tasali said she saw changes after just one week of the two-week sleep improvement program.
“Some of them said to me, ‘I thought I was going to be less productive.
You’re giving me so much time in bed, how am I going to do all this work
that I’m supposed to do?’
And at the end of the two weeks, they kept telling me that they were more productive, because they were more energized and more alert.” One of the study’s limitations, Kolla said, is that none of the subjects suffered from insomnia or other major sleep disorders, which impact millions of people.
“These are only subjects who do not have sleep disturbances but have what we would
call behaviorally induced insufficient sleep,” he said. “While the goal was to extend to 8.5 hours, it is quite likely that a majority of people do not require that much amount of sleep. So future work must look at participant-specific information to see who is likely to benefit from this kind of intervention.” Despite those limitations, he said it’s clear people who are attempting to lose weight should pay attention “to the amount of sleep they are getting — avoiding voluntary sleep deprivation — is going to play an important role.”
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