If you’re looking to live a long, healthy life, you might want to start incorporating more fruits, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains into your diet.
New research suggests that adding plant-based food items to your regular diet could decrease your risk of dying from causes of premature death like heart disease.
The new research out of Harvard was presented at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention/Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions 2019 on March 6 in Houston, Texas.
The study was based on data from both women and men who participated in two major national health studies.
The researchers looked at information on 47,983 women with an average age of 64 who participated in the Nurse's Health Study, as well as 25,737 men, of the same average age, who participated in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.
None of these people had a prior history of cancer or heart disease when they entered their studies, and the researchers assessed changes in these people’s diets over a 12-year period from 1998 to 2014, according to an American Heart Association press release.
The research team, led by Dr. Megu Y. Baden, a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, devised three separate scales to measure how much plant-based foods people incorporated into their day-to-day diets.
These were: overall plant-based diet, healthy plant-based diet, and unhealthy plant-based diet.
The unhealthiest option included items like fruit juices, refined grains, sweets, and potatoes.
What did they observe?
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