by - Less than 0.1% of UK adults adhere to the UK Government’s Dietary Guidelines for a healthy, balanced diet.
- Adults could add almost 9 years to their life expectancy by changing from an unhealthy diet to the diet set out in the UK’s Eatwell Guide, a UK Biobank study has revealed.
- Those already following the ‘median’ diet in the UK, who only partially follow the Eatwell Guide recommendations, could gain around 3 years of life expectancy by making a complete switch to a diet more healthy.
- The authors of the study are calling 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 “leading global health risks,” it says
To improve diet worldwide, the WHO is working with countries to commit to a number of initiatives, including ending
The UK Government published its Healthy Eating Guide in 2016 to help people follow a healthy, balanced diet. It outlines the importance of eating at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, reducing salt and saturated fat intake, and promotes the consumption of whole grains and pulses, along with portion size recommendations and caloric intake.
Despite this guidance being published to ensure that policy is developed in the UK in line with these dietary aims, research published in BMJ Open indicates that less than 0.1% of the country’s population follows a diet that adheres to the guidebook’s recommendations.
The UK Biobank is a database established 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 overall health.
A recent study by a team of researchers based at the University of Bergen, Norway analyzed UK Biobank data from over 465,000 participants to determine the impact on their life expectancy of following the Dietary Guidelines . Its results can be seen in Nature’s Food.
The dietary patterns of the participants were assessed, and the intake of all food groups was divided into five quintiles, from the lowest to the highest. The dietary patterns associated with longevity were the provinces for each food group with the lowest mortality risk.
Unhealthy dietary patterns were characterized by limited amounts of whole grains, vegetables and fruit, fish and white meat, but a high intake of red and processed meat, eggs, refined grains and sugary drinks. Results were also reported based on adherence to the dietary pattern recommended by the Healthy Eating Guide.
Researchers adjusted the data for factors including age, sex, area-based sociodemographic deprivation, smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity level, and body mass index (BMI).
Their analysis showed that a 40-year-old man whose unhealthy diet followed the Eatwell Guide’s dietary recommendations would add 8.9 years to his life expectancy. For a woman of the same age, life expectancy increased by 8.6 years due to this change.
For a 70-year-old man the change would correspond to a 4-year increase in life expectancy, and a 4.4-year increase for a woman of this age.
When these results were adjusted for BMI and energy consumption, the overall increase in life expectancy that could be attributed to improvements in diet declined slightly.
Lead author Professor Lars Fadnes from the University of Bergen, head of a research group at Haukeland University Hospital, said: Medical News Today:
“Our analysis and other research show that what we eat is linked to obesity risk, which again contributes to premature deaths. Our analysis could show that the risk of premature deaths associated with overweight/obesity was about a quarter of the increased risk of unhealthy food intake and mortality.”
Researchers also looked at which foods had the greatest impact on reducing overall mortality risk.
They found that eating more whole grains and nuts and less red meat and sugary drinks was associated with the greatest improvements in life expectancy.
Because there were few individuals who adhered to a healthy diet, these data provided the least amount of certainty, the study authors said.
“In our analyses, we not only use groups that comply with all aspects of the guidelines but we do not compare all parts of the population that comply more or less with each of these recommendations, and then we see who all of the recommendations add up to many health benefits. and how this can be put together,” said Professor Lars.
“For some food groups, it is not possible to divide equally between five different intake ranges — what we label as quintiles. Therefore, some intake categories may have fewer people than others. As more people increase within an intake level of precision and certainty, fewer people will add more uncertainty to this,” he said.
The authors said their findings supported long-term, multi-sectoral action to improve people’s diets in the UK, including taxes on unhealthy food while reducing the cost of healthy foods.
Dr. Linia Patel, a dietitian and spokeswoman for the British Dietetic Association, who was not involved in the research MNT that’s her
The results were not surprising, with the Eating Well Guide backed by evidence showing it supports a healthy diet, she said:
“We know that they eat more whole grains, they eat more legumes, they eat more plant-based foods, they have all the plant goodness that’s beneficial for us. So this is not necessarily new. What was nice is that they have made another model to quantify the number of years, which is good to see.”
However, Dr Patel also noted that the Eating Well Guide has attracted some criticism for not being inclusive of South Asian diets, and diets typically followed by black people in the UK.
She also warned that the UK Biobank cohort may not be fully representative of the country’s population.
“[I]f you look at UK Biobank data in general — although I’m currently studying it myself — [it] is not very representative. […] [I]t tells the story, but it doesn’t necessarily tell the most representative story because it is the population group […] mostly Caucasian people, not of low socio-economic status. So it gives us part of the story, but not the whole story.”
She said that while data like this is helpful, it still doesn’t reflect the best approach to designing policy to help people eat better for their health.
Referring to the low adherence to the Healthy Eating Guide, Dr. Patel said the policy should ensure that the diet is achievable for people to adhere to. In addition to the policy recommendations made by the authors and others, she believes that education is key to ensuring healthy nutrition.
“We know that beans and lentils aren’t necessarily that expensive, but for some reason people don’t use them. Why aren’t people using them? What are the barriers? The more questions like that I think we need to ask to fully understand how we can apply research like this in practice to policy.”
