Eat better to live longer

More than half of the Quebec population cannot eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Yet this is what has been recommended for many years by Health Canada. A recent Norwegian study could weigh in the balance: it shows that by changing your eating habits, you can gain up to more than 10 years of life expectancy.

Chloe Bourquin
special collaboration

A diet high in fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains and legumes, and low in red or processed meat. This is what seems to be the “optimal” diet that would allow you to live the longest, according to a study published on February 8, 2022 in PLOS Medicine.

Based on the Global Burden of Disease, a worldwide research and data collection program on diseases and mortality risks in which more than 3,600 researchers collaborate, this study translates mortality risks into life expectancy. Enough to give an image that is both more positive and more telling of healthy eating, according to Nancy Presse, professor and director of the Laboratory on Seniors’ Diet and Geriatric Nutrition at the University of Sherbrooke. “If you adopt this eating behavior, it will add five years to your life expectancy. It is a strong image for the population,” she underlines.

And the results are clear: “Switching from a Western diet to an ‘optimal’ diet would save more than a decade for young adults. For older people, the gain would be smaller, but not negligible, ”says Lars Thore Fadnes, professor in the department of public health at the University of Bergen, Norway, and first author of the article. “It’s the same principle as that of the RRSP, illustrates Nancy Presse. If you start putting $25 a week in your RRSP at age 20, you will have more benefits at age 75 than if you started at age 50. »

This study is in line with many others published over the past 30 years, according to Martin Juneau, cardiologist and director of prevention at the Montreal Heart Institute.

The study even goes so far as to calculate the gain for each food that is removed from your plate or added to it, depending on the age at which these changes are made. For example, simply cutting out red meat can save nearly two years of life expectancy. According to Nancy Presse, however, it is a perilous exercise to consider foods independently of each other. “There are communicating vessels in food. People who eat less red meat, for example, will eat more fish. So here, are we looking at the harmful effect of red meat or the beneficial effect of fish? It’s intrinsically linked,” she explains.

The Norwegian researchers have made a tool available so that everyone can estimate their current diet and calculate their own potential benefits of changing it. “This could allow people to make wiser and more feasible food choices, with more health benefits,” says Lars Thore Fadnes. However, he specifies that “this study is based on estimates at the population level, it is not a prediction at the individual level”. In other words, “these figures should not be taken literally, but it gives an idea of ​​the magnitude of the impact of a good diet or a bad diet,” explains Martin Juneau.

Will this study be able to convince people to change their lifestyle? Nancy Presse is not so sure. “It’s good to send a message about the fact that you have to eat well, but what convinces people, for weight loss for example, is when they see a benefit very quickly, in weeks or months later, she said with a sigh. It’s a big investment for someone in their 20s to change their diet significantly for the rest of their life to possibly gain 7 or 10 years of life expectancy at the end of it. »

Martin Juneau nevertheless welcomes this study which, according to him, makes it possible to better embrace all the potential effects of food on health. He regrets that, “doctors often look at food through the very narrow window of cholesterol or blood sugar. But food has extraordinary effects everywhere else: on inflammation, on blood thrombogenicity, on endothelial function, on neuron functions…”, he lists.