by - Less than 0.1% of adults in the UK follow the UK government’s Eatwell Guide to a healthy, balanced diet.
- Adults could increase their life expectancy by almost nine years if they switched from an unhealthy diet to the diet outlined in the UK Eatwell Guide, a UK Biobank study has shown.
- Those already following the “medium” diet in the UK, which only partially follows the Eatwell Guide recommendations, could gain around 3 years in life expectancy if they make the complete switch to a healthier diet.
- The study’s authors call for long-term action to enable more adults to eat healthily to reduce the burden of disease from poor diet.
Poor diet and lack of physical activity are “the main global health risks,” according to the
To improve diet globally, WHO is working with countries to commit to a number of initiatives, including the elimination of
The UK Government published its Eatwell Guide in 2016 to help people follow a healthy, balanced diet. It outlines the importance of eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, reducing salt and saturated fat intake, and promoting the consumption of whole grains and legumes, along with suggestions on portion sizes and caloric intake.
Although this guidance was published to ensure that policies in the UK are developed in line with these dietary goals, research published in Open BMJ suggests that less than 0.1% of the country’s population follows a diet that adheres to the guide’s recommendations.
The UK Biobank is a database created in 2006 that tracks the health of half a million people, aged between 40 and 69, living in the UK. The Biobank collects data on participants’ diets as well as their general health.
A recent study by a team of researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, analyzed UK Biobank data from more than 465,000 participants to determine the impact of adherence to the diet outlined in the Eatwell Guide on their life expectancy. . Your results appear in Nature food.
Participants’ dietary patterns were assessed, dividing intake of all food groups into five quintiles, from lowest to highest. The dietary patterns associated with longevity were the quintiles of each food group with the lowest risk of mortality.
Unhealthy dietary patterns were characterized by limited amounts of whole grains, vegetables and fruits, fish, and white meat, but high intakes of red and processed meats, eggs, refined grains, and sugary drinks. Results were also reported according to compliance with the dietary pattern recommended by the Eatwell Guide.
The researchers adjusted the data for factors such as age, sex, area-based sociodemographic deprivation, smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity level, and body mass index (BMI).
Their analysis indicated that a 40-year-old man who changed his diet from an unhealthy diet to one that followed the Eatwell Guide’s dietary recommendations would add 8.9 years to his life expectancy. For a woman of the same age, this change meant an 8.6-year increase in life expectancy.
For a 70-year-old man, the change would correspond to an increase of 4 years in life expectancy, and 4.4 years for a woman of this age.
When these results were adjusted for BMI and energy intake, the overall increase in life expectancy that could be attributed to improvements in diet decreased somewhat.
Lead author Professor Lars Fadnes of the University of Bergen, leader of the research group at Haukeland University Hospital, said Medical news today:
“Our analyzes and other research indicate that what we eat is linked to the risk of obesity, which again is a risk factor contributing to premature deaths. “Our analyzes would indicate that the risk of premature deaths related to overweight and obesity was approximately a quarter of the increased dietary risk due to unhealthy diet and mortality.”
The researchers also looked at which foods had the greatest impact on decreasing the risk of overall mortality.
They found that consuming more whole grains and nuts and less red meat and sugary drinks was associated with greater improvements in life expectancy.
Because there were so few people following a healthy diet, these data provided the least amount of certainty, the study authors said.
“In our analyses, we not only use groups that meet all aspects of the guidelines, but we compare all parts of the population that more or less meet each of these recommendations, and then we see how many health benefits each provides. one of the recommendations. and how this can add up,” Prof. Lars added.
“For some food groups, it is not possible to divide them equally between five different ranges of intake, what we call quintiles. Therefore, some admission categories may have fewer people than others. As more people within an intake level increase precision and certainty, fewer people will contribute to greater uncertainty for them,” he noted.
The authors said their results supported long-term multi-sector action to improve the diets of people in the UK, including taxing unhealthy foods while reducing the cost of healthy foods.
Dr. Linia Patel, a dietician and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, who was not involved in the research, said TMN that she herself
The results were not surprising and the Eatwell Guide was backed by evidence showing that it supports a healthy diet, he said:
“We know that eating more whole grains, eating more legumes, eating more plant-based foods, have all the plant-based goodness that is beneficial for us. So this is not necessarily new. The good thing is that they did a different model to actually quantify the number of years, which is good to see.”
However, Dr Patel also noted that the Eatwell Guide has attracted some criticism for not including South Asian diets and diets typically followed by black people in the UK.
He also warned that the UK Biobank cohort may not be fully representative of the country’s population.
“[I]If you look at the UK Biobank data in general, although I’m currently conducting a study on it, [it] It is not very representative. […] [I]It tells the story, but not necessarily the most representative because the population group is […] predominantly Caucasian people, who don’t really come from a low socioeconomic background. So it gives us a part of the story, but not the whole story.”
He said that while data like this is useful, it still doesn’t indicate the best approach to designing policies to help people eat better for their health.
Noting low adherence to the Eatwell Guide, Dr Patel said policy should ensure the diet is feasible for people to follow. In addition to policy suggestions made by the authors and others, she believes that education is key to ensuring healthy nutrition.
“We know that beans and lentils are not necessarily that expensive, but for some reason people don’t use them. Why don’t people use them? What are the barriers? “I think more questions like this need to be asked so that we fully understand how we can translate research like this into practical policy application.”
