The life-extending effects of a healthy diet

It's amazing the impact nutrition can have at any age...

What causes around 75,000 premature deaths each year in the U.K. but is hardly mentioned during doctor’s medical training?: Diet.

Incredibly, 75,000 accounts for more than 10% of the total deaths in the U.K. That’s quite a chunk. It’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate about nutrition education.

Every day, we’re bombarded with loud, brightly coloured mixed messages from ‘news’ outlets, social media influencers, and food companies: 

Coffee causes cancer, and ultra-processed snacks with added fibre are essential for good health.

If you want to get fit, you need protein powder.

Make sure you always choose low-fat products.

Also, seed oils will kill you, and you definitely need this incredibly expensive vitamin tablet… and on and on.

Most of it is absolute nonsense.

The sad thing is that this marketing and media onslaught is making people sick and shortening their lives with a disproportionate impact on the young, the elderly, and those with less access to choice. 

The unrelenting flow of confusing and conflicting information helps explain why only 0.1% of the U.K. population follows the official Eatwell Guidelines set out by the government. There’s just so much noisy information floating around.

Nourishing your lifespan 

Scientists have known for a long time that a healthy diet can increase your lifespan and, more importantly, extend the length of time you spend in good health. 

But precisely how much extra time can a good diet buy you?

A recent study asks this question, and the results provide a silver lining to an otherwise bleak backdrop. 

The authors of the new research calculated how many extra years you can add to your life if you permanently switch to a healthier way of eating. And the results are eye-opening.

Longevity-associated diet

To investigate, the scientists accessed data from 467,354 participants from the UK Biobank – a long-term, ongoing study.