People who follow government guidelines on healthy eating significantly reduce their risk of an early death and can also contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A study in the journal BMJ Open found that people who adhere to five or more recommendations in the government’s Eatwell guidelines experienced an estimated seven percent reduction in their mortality risk.
Researchers also found that participants who ate the recommended 400g of fruits and vegetables daily experienced a 10 percent reduction in mortality risk compared to those who did not follow this guideline.
Diets that followed between five and nine of the evaluated recommendations were also associated with a 30 percent reduction in CO2 emissions per day, compared to the average daily CO2 emissions of those who evaluated just two of the nine keep recommendations, the study found.
“We found that for every recommendation you follow, we get back a positive impact on health and the environment,” said Dr Pauline Scheelbeek, lead author of the study and assistant professor of nutrition and environmental epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene. & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), told the Telegraph.
The current Eatwell Guide, published in 2016, provides advice on how to lead a balanced and healthy diet.
The guide covers nine main principles and advises people to eat five portions of fruits and vegetables while consuming no more than 70g of red and processed meats per day.
Authors of the study say their results clearly show the potential benefits that after the government’s health monitoring can have on the long term health of the nation as well as the planet.
However, the survey also found that less than 0.1 percent of people follow all nine guidelines and that the majority of people (about 44 percent) follow only three or four of the recommendations.
“The Eatwell guide has been around for years,” said Dr. Scheelbeek, but the proportion of people whose diets follow the recommendations “is still very, very small.”
“National Dietary Recommendations provide important evidence-based guidance to people on the components of a healthy diet,” said Professor Alan Dangour, director of the Center for Climate Change and Planetary Health at LSHTM and one of the study’s senior authors.
“Our new analysis shows that following the Eatwell Guide would significantly improve human health in the UK.”
The study was led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the University of Oxford and the Wellcome Trust.
It looked at data from three major UK databases: the UK Biobank, EPIC Oxford and the Million Women Study, to discover the link between diet and environmental and human health.
The results come just weeks after the prime minister unveiled his latest anti-obesity strategy to help Britons lose weight, get active and eat better following his own ‘wake-up call’ from Covid-19 and research that suggests that those who are overweight are most at risk of the virus.
NHS data show that in England 67 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women are now overweight or obese, and by 2030 10 per cent of the population will have type 2 diabetes on current trends.
The direct costs of treating health complications associated with obesity in the NHS now stand at more than £ 6 billion a year, with broader costs to society of £ 27 billion a year. Last year, 876,000 hospital admissions were overweight-related, an increase of 23 percent on 2017/18.
While the authors of the study said that their results show that adhering to the government’s recommendations could have a direct positive effect on human and planetary health, other experts feared that the lack of apparent benefits of the EGW undermined.
“Perhaps one of the most notable findings is the low level of compliance with the guideline at present in the UK,” said Prof Andrew Salter, Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry at the University of Nottingham. “This is perhaps disappointing, given the fact that the Eatwell Plate has been the cornerstone of the UK Government’s diet policy since 2007 (although updated to EEC in 2016).”
“Given all the uncertainties surrounding the future of England’s public health, this calls into question what further measures the government can take to improve the country’s diet. [and asks whether] even more draconian measures would ever be adopted by the majority of the UK population, ‘he said.
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