Small changes in diet may help you live healthier and more sustainable: Studies

Washington: According to a University of Michigan study, eating a hot dog can take 36 minutes to live a healthy life, but choosing to eat nuts instead can give you an extra 26 minutes of a healthy life. increase. The study, published in Nature Food, evaluated more than 5,800 foods and ranked them by the burden of nutritional illness on humans and their environmental impact. Replacing 10% of daily calorie intake from beef and processed meats with a mixture of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, and carefully selected seafood reduces dietary carbon dioxide emissions by a third. It turns out that people can be healthy for 48 minutes. Minutes per day.

“In general, dietary recommendations lack specific and practical directions that motivate people to change their behavior, and dietary recommendations rarely address their environmental impact. “Katerina Stylianou, who studied doctoral candidates and postdoctoral fellows in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at UM schools, said. Of public health.

She is currently working as Director of Public Health Information and Data Strategy at the Detroit Department of Health. This work is based on the new epidemiologically based nutritional index, the Health Nutritional Index. It was developed by investigators in collaboration with Nutrition Impact LLC nutritionist Victor Fulgoni III. HENI calculates the net beneficial or detrimental health burden in minutes of a healthy life associated with the provision of consumed food.

This indicator is an indication of global disease burden in which disease mortality and morbidity are associated with a single food choice for an individual. In the case of HENI, researchers used 15 dietary risk factors and disease burden estimates from GBD, and based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination’s “Eat in the United States” database, nutritional profiles of foods consumed in the United States. Combined with. Foods with a positive score add a healthy life, while foods with a negative score are associated with health consequences that can adversely affect human health.

To assess the environmental impact of food, researchers used IMPACT World +. This is a method of assessing the life cycle effects of food (production, processing, manufacturing, cooking / cooking, consumption, waste), adding improved assessments of water use and human health. Damage due to the formation of fine particulate matter. They created a score of 18 environmental indicators, taking into account detailed food recipes and expected food waste.

Finally, like traffic lights, researchers categorized foods into three color zones: green, yellow, and red, based on a combination of nutritional and environmental performance. The Green Zone represents foods for which it is recommended to eat more, including foods that are nutritionally beneficial and have less environmental impact. Foods in this zone are primarily nuts, fruits, field-grown vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and some seafood. The red zone contains foods that have a significant nutritional or environmental impact and should be reduced or avoided in the diet. Nutritional effects were primarily caused by processed meats, and climate and most other environmental effects were caused by beef and pork, lamb, and processed meats.

Researchers acknowledge that the range of all indicators varies significantly, and point out that nutritionally beneficial foods do not always minimize their environmental impact.

“Previous studies have often limited the findings to discussions of plant and animal-based foods,” says Stylianou. “In general, we find that plant-based foods are better, but there is considerable variability in both plant-based and animal-based foods.”

Based on their findings, researchers suggest that:

• Reduction of foods that have the most negative health and environmental impact, such as highly processed meat, beef, shrimp, then pork, lamb, and greenhouse-grown vegetables.
• Increase the most nutritionally beneficial foods, such as field-grown fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts, and low-environmental seafood.

“The urgency of dietary changes to improve human health and the environment is clear,” said Olivier Joliet, UM professor of environmental health science and senior author of the treatise. “Our findings show that small targeted alternatives provide a viable and powerful strategy for significant health and environmental benefits without the need for dramatic dietary changes. is showing.”

The project was carried out within the framework of unlimited grants 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 rating systems. Ultimately, we want to expand to countries around the world.