Eating a hot dog can cost you 36 minutes of healthy life, while choosing a handful of nuts could save you up to 26 more minutes.
- Researchers have developed a nutritional health index to measure the number of minutes of healthy life gained or lost by food.
- While some foods like vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes add minutes of healthy life, others like meat and processed foods lose them.
- They have also developed a food environmental impact index, which highlights the harmful effect of meat consumption on the planet.
Prioritizing “healthy” foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and certain seafood could not only reduce the carbon footprint of your diet by a third, but also save you 48 minutes of life in good health daily. Conversely, consuming a lot of red meat and processed foods can eat away at your healthy life capital.
This is the conclusion reached by researchers at the University of Michigan School of Public Health after evaluating more than 5,800 foods. Ranked according to their human burden of disease and their impact on the environment, these foods can contribute to longer, healthier lives. The study has just been published in the journal nature food.
Healthier foods with low environmental impact
In general, dietary recommendations lack specific, concrete guidance to encourage people to change their behavior, and dietary recommendations rarely take environmental effects into account.”, says Katerina Stylianou, lead author of the study.
To better visualize the impact of food choices on health, researchers have developed a nutritional health index (HENI) comprising 15 dietary risk factors. This calculates the net health burden, beneficial or harmful, in minutes of life in good health, associated with a portion of food consumed. Foods with a positive score add minutes of healthy life, while foods with a negative score are associated with health outcomes that can be detrimental to human health.
They also evaluated the environmental impact of the food consumed by taking into account different parameters on the life cycle of food (production, processing, manufacturing, preparation/cooking, consumption, waste), and added improved evaluations of the use water and damage to human health caused by the formation of fine particles.
Finally, the researchers categorized the foods into three color zones: green, yellow and red, based on their combined nutritional and environmental performance.
Ban on red meat, processed foods and greenhouse-grown vegetables
As a result, green foods are both good for health and good for the planet, due to their low environmental impact. These are mainly nuts, fruits, field vegetables, legumes, whole grains and some seafood.
Conversely, foods in the red zone have significant nutritional or environmental impacts and should therefore be reduced or avoided in the diet. These are mainly meat (beef, pork, lamb, etc.) and processed meats.
These results suggest cutting back on foods with the most negative health and environmental impacts, including processed meat, beef, shrimp, pork, lamb, and greenhouse-grown vegetables.
The urgency of modifying the diet to improve human health and the environment is obvious, underlines Olivier Jolliet, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Montreal and main author of the article. Our results demonstrate that small, targeted substitutions offer a feasible and powerful strategy to achieve significant health and environmental benefits without requiring dramatic changes in diet.”
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