According to a University of Michigan study, eating a hot dog can cost you 36 minutes of your healthy life, while eating nuts can help you gain an extra 26 minutes of healthy life.
The study, published in the journal Nature Food, evaluated more than 5,800 foods, ranking them based on their nutritional disease burden for humans and their impact on the environment. It found that replacing 10% of daily calories from beef and processed meats with fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and selected seafood can reduce your dietary carbon footprint by a third and people can gain a healthy minute every 48 minutes. day.
“In general, dietary recommendations lack specific and effective guidance to motivate people to change their behavior, and rarely do dietary recommendations address environmental impacts,” said Katerina Stylianou, who conducted the research as a doctoral candidate and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health. Science in UM’s School of Public Health. He currently serves as the Director of Public Health Information and Data Strategy at the Detroit Health Department.
The work is based on a new epidemiology-based nutrition index, the Health Nutrition Index, which the investigators developed in collaboration with nutritionist Victor Fulgoni III from Nutrition Impact LLC. The HENI calculates the net beneficial or detrimental health burden in healthy life minutes associated with a serving of food consumed.
Calculating the impact on human health
The index is an adaptation of the Global Burden of Disease in which disease mortality and morbidity are linked to a single food choice of an individual. For the HENI, researchers used 15 dietary risk factors and disease burden estimates from the GBD and combined them with nutrient profiles of foods consumed in the United States based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey’s Americas database. Foods with a positive score add healthy minutes to life, while foods with a negative score are associated with health outcomes that may be harmful to human health.
Adding environmental influences to the mix
To assess the environmental impact of food, the researchers used IMPACT World+, a method for assessing the life cycle impacts of food (production, processing, production, preparation/cooking, consumption, waste) and added advanced assessments for water use and human health. Damage from formation of fine particulate matter. They created scores for 18 environmental indicators by considering detailed food recipes as well as expected food waste.
Finally, the researchers classified foods into three color zones: green, yellow and red, based on their combined nutritional and environmental performance, much like traffic lights.
The Green Zone represents foods that are recommended to be added to one’s diet and includes foods that are nutritionally beneficial and have a low environmental impact. Foods in this region are mainly nuts, fruits, field-grown vegetables, legumes, whole grains and some seafood.
The Red Zone includes foods that have substantial nutritional or environmental impact and that should be reduced or avoided in one’s diet. Nutritional impacts were primarily driven by processed meat, and climate and most other environmental impacts were driven by beef and pork, lamb, and processed meat.
The researchers acknowledge that the range of all indicators varies significantly and also indicates that nutritionally beneficial foods may not always cause the least environmental impact and vice versa.
“Previous studies have often reduced their findings to a plant-versus-animal-based diet discussion,” Stylianou said. “Although we find that plant-based diets generally work better, there are substantial differences between both plant-based and animal-based diets.”
Based on their findings, the researchers suggest:
- Cutting back on foods with the most negative health and environmental impacts, including highly processed meats, beef, shrimp, followed by pork, lamb, and greenhouse-grown vegetables.
- Growing the most nutritionally beneficial foods, including farm-raised fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts and low-environmental impact seafood.
“The urgency of dietary changes to improve human health and the environment is clear,” said Olivier Joliet, UM professor of environmental health sciences and senior author of the paper. “Our findings show that small targeted substitutions offer a feasible and powerful strategy to achieve significant health and environmental benefits without the need for dramatic dietary changes.”
The project was carried out within the framework of an unrestricted grant from the National Dairy Council and the University of Michigan’s Dow Sustainability Fellowship. The researchers are also working with partners in Switzerland, Brazil and Singapore to develop similar assessment systems. Eventually, they want to expand it to countries around the world.