Small changes in diet could help you live healthier, more sustainable lives: study

Washington: Eating a hot dog could cost you 36 minutes of a healthy life, while choosing to eat a serving of nuts instead could help you gain 26 minutes of a lifetime, according to a University of Michigan study. healthy. The study, published in the journal Nature Food, evaluated more than 5,800 foods, ranking them according to their nutritional burden of disease to humans and their impact on the environment. He found that replacing 10% of the daily calorie intake of beef and processed meats with a blend of selected fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and seafood could reduce your dietary carbon footprint by a third and allow people to gain 48 minutes of healthy living. minutes a day.

“In general, dietary recommendations lack specific, concrete guidance to motivate people to change their behavior, and dietary recommendations rarely address environmental impacts,” said Katerina Stylianou, who researched a doctoral student and researcher. postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at UM’s School. of Public Health.

She currently works as the Director of Public Health Information and Data Strategy at the Detroit Department of Health. This work is based on a new epidemiologically based nutritional index, the Health Nutritional Index, which researchers developed in collaboration with nutritionist Victor Fulgoni III of Nutrition Impact LLC. HENI calculates the net benefit or harm health burden in minutes of healthy living associated with a serving of food consumed.

The index is an adaptation of the global burden of disease in which mortality and disease morbidity are associated with a single dietary choice of an individual. For HENI, the researchers used 15 dietary risk factors and GBD disease burden estimates and combined them with the nutrient profiles of foods consumed in the United States, based on the What We Eat in America database. from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Foods with positive scores add minutes to healthy living, while foods with negative scores are associated with health outcomes that can be detrimental to human health.

To assess the environmental impact of food, the researcher used IMPACT World +, a method to assess the life cycle impact of food (production, processing, manufacturing, preparation / cooking, consumption, waste), and added assessments improvements in water use and human health. damage due to the formation of fine particles. They developed scores for 18 environmental indicators taking into account detailed food recipes as well as anticipated food waste.

Finally, the researchers classified the foods into three color zones: green, yellow, and red, based on their combined nutritional and environmental performance, much like a traffic light. The green area represents foods that are recommended to be increased in one’s diet and contains foods that are both nutritionally beneficial and have low environmental impact. Foods in this zone are primarily nuts, fruits, field-grown vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and some seafood. The red zone includes foods that have significant nutritional or environmental impacts and should be reduced. or avoided in the diet. Nutritional impacts were mainly due to processed meats, and climate and most other environmental impacts were due to beef and pork, lamb and processed meats.

The researchers recognize that the range of all indicators varies considerably and also point out that nutritionally beneficial foods may not always generate the lowest environmental impacts and vice versa.

“Previous studies have often narrowed their results down to a discussion of foods of plant origin versus foods of animal origin,” Stylianou said. “Although we find that plant-based foods generally work better, there is considerable variation between plant-based and animal-based foods.”

Based on their findings, the researchers suggest:

• Decrease in foods with the most negative impacts on health and the environment, including highly processed meat, beef, shrimp, followed by pork, lamb and greenhouse-grown vegetables.
• Increase the most nutritionally beneficial foods, including field-grown fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts and seafood with low environmental impact.

“The urgency of dietary changes to improve human health and the environment is clear,” said Olivier Jolliet, UM professor of environmental health sciences and lead 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 dietary changes.”

The project was carried out under an unrestricted grant from the National Dairy Council and the University of Michigan Dow Sustainability Fellowship. Researchers are also working with partners in Switzerland, Brazil and Singapore to develop similar assessment systems there. Ultimately, they would like to extend it to countries around the world.