Estimating impact of food choices on life expectancy

journals.plos.org

26 points·aaraujo002··5 comments

Their estimation tool does not seem to load, but I appreciate the attempt to make something you can play around with: https://food4healthylife.org/

Not having an alcohol consumption category seems a bit odd for this sort of thing.

I wonder how healthy eating confounds with other general lifestyle habits that may lead to observed effects. As a data point, exercise freaks generally eat very well.

The study is a meta-study over 250.000 published scientific articles. Hard to believe that general lifestyle habits would alone explain these results, given that individual peer-reviewed studies are expected to have at least partially accounted for biases and confounds, and general lifestyle habits would probably vary across such immense population.

> As a data point, exercise freaks generally eat very well.

The fitness nuts I know stuff their face with protein powder, chicken, egg whites and pasta.

It's effective if you want to gain muscles, but I have no idea if it's healthy.

Conclusions

A sustained dietary change may give substantial health gains for people of all ages both for optimized and feasible changes. Gains are predicted to be larger the earlier the dietary changes are initiated in life. The Food4HealthyLife calculator that we provide online could be useful for clinicians, policy makers, and laypeople to understand the health impact of dietary choices.

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