- Less than 0.1% of adults in the UK adhere to the UK government’s Eatwell Guide to a healthy, balanced diet.
- Adults could increase life expectancy by almost nine years by switching from an unhealthy diet to the diet outlined in the UK Eatwell Guide, a study by the UK Biobank has found.
- Those in Britain already following the ‘average’ diet, which only partially follows the recommendations of the Eatwell Guide, could gain around three years of life expectancy by making the complete switch to a healthier diet.
- The study authors call for long-term action to enable more adults to eat healthily and thus reduce the burden of disease caused by poor nutrition.
Poor diet and lack of exercise are “leading global health risks,” according to the paper.
To improve nutrition worldwide, 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 eat a healthy, balanced diet. It outlines the importance of eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, reducing salt and saturated fat intake, and promotes the consumption of whole grains and legumes, in addition to suggestions for portion size and calorie intake.
Although this guide has been published to ensure that policies in Britain are developed in line with these nutritional targets, research has been published in BMJ opened suggests that less than 0.1% of the country’s population follows a diet that meets the guide’s recommendations.
The UK Biobank is a database set up in 2006 that tracks the health of half a million people, aged between 40 and 69, living in Britain. The Biobank collects data about participants’ diets, but also about their overall 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 following the diet outlined in the Eatwell Guide on their life expectancy. The results appear in Natural food.
Participants’ dietary patterns were assessed, with intake of all food groups broken down into five quintiles, from lowest to highest. Dietary patterns associated with longevity were the quintiles for each food group with the lowest mortality risk.
Unhealthy diets were characterized by limited amounts of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, fish and white meat, but high intakes of red and processed meat, eggs, refined grains and sugary drinks. Results were also reported based on following the dietary pattern recommended by the Eatwell Guide.
Researchers adjusted the data for factors such as age, gender, area-based sociodemographic deprivation, smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity level, and body mass index (BMI).
Their analysis found that a 40-year-old man who changed his diet from an unhealthy diet to one that followed the nutritional recommendations of the Eatwell Guide would increase his life expectancy by 8.9 years. For a woman of the same age, this change led to an increase in life expectancy of 8.6 years.
For a 70-year-old man, the change would correspond to an increase in life expectancy of four years, and to an increase of 4.4 years for a woman of this age.
When these results were adjusted for BMI and energy expenditure, the overall increase in life expectancy attributable to improvements in diet decreased slightly.
Lead author Prof. Lars Fadnes from the University of Bergen, research group leader 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 is another risk factor for premature deaths. Our analyzes may indicate that the risk of premature deaths due to overweight/obesity was approximately a quarter of the dietary increased risk of unhealthy eating and mortality.”
Researchers also looked at which foods had the biggest impact on reducing overall mortality risk.
They found that consuming more whole grains and nuts and less red meat and sugary drinks was associated with the greatest improvements in life expectancy.
Because so few people adhered to a healthy diet, these data offered the least certainty, the study authors said.
“In our analyses, we don’t just use groups that adhere to every aspect of the guidelines, but rather we compare all parts of the population that adhere more or less to each of these recommendations, and then see how much health benefit each of the recommendations contributes . and how this can be added together,” added Prof. Lars.
“For some food groups it is not possible to distribute evenly across five different intake levels – what we label as quintiles. Some intake categories may therefore have fewer people than others. As more people within an intake level increase accuracy and certainty, fewer people will contribute to more uncertainty about it,” he noted.
The authors said their results supported long-term, multi-sectoral action to improve people’s diets in Britain, including taxes on unhealthy food, while reducing the cost of healthy food.
Dr. Linia Patel, a dietitian and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, who was not involved in the research, said MNT that her own
The results were not surprising, and the Eatwell Guide was supported by evidence showing that it supports a healthy diet, she said:
“We know that eating more whole grains, eating more legumes, and eating more plant-based foods, they contain all the plant-based goodness that is beneficial for us. So this is not necessarily new. What was nice is that they created another model to actually quantify the number of years, which is good to see.”
Dr. However, Patel also noted that the Eatwell Guide has received some criticism for not taking into account South Asian diets, as well as the diets typically followed by black people in Britain.
She 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 – even though I’m currently researching it myself – [it] is not very representative. […] [I]t tells the story, but it doesn’t necessarily tell the most representative story because the population group is […] predominantly white people, who are not actually of low socio-economic status. So it gives us part of the story, but not the full story.”
She said that while this kind of data is useful, it still doesn’t indicate the best approach to designing policies to help people eat better for their health.
Pointing out the low compliance with the Eatwell Guide, Dr. Patel said the policy should ensure that the diet is feasible for people to stick to. In addition to the policy suggestions of the authors and others, she believes that education is the key to ensuring healthy diets.
“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 can fully understand how we can take something like this research into the practical application of policy.”