The Diet That Doubles Or Triples Your Mortality Risk

How much does diet affect our longevity? Looking at the small picture (say, today’s dinner), it’s easy to think “not much”.

But patterns of eating over time tell a different story:

8,231 people died to bring you this information

We often cite longitudinal studies, and when we do, we often mention how many participants there were at the start of the study, and that not all of them survived the duration, because such is the nature of longitudinal studies, especially those investigating factors that affect mortality—people die.

But it’s worth remembering that not only do people die, people die from preventable things.

Preventable things, specifically, that the study in question informs us about.

So in other words, let’s learn from that tragedy.

In this case, it was a study with 151,628 participants aged 45–69, and in terms of mortality, the researchers noted “8,231 deaths were recorded”.

Which… That age bracket, that’s not very old, is it? So, what went wrong?

In few words: it’s about diet, and frailty.

They measured the participants’ habitual diet across 7 indices, all of which we’ve written about before at 10almonds:

• Alternate Healthy Eating Index (AHEI)
• Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) score
• Mediterranean diet (MED) score
• Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII)
• Three plant-based diet indices (PDI)
  • overall PDI
  • healthful PDI
  • unhealthful PDI

The distinction between those last two is “whole foods plant based diet” vs “ultra-processed foods that just happen to not contain animal ingredients”.

Of the seven, most of them are indices that score how healthily you eat, and two of them (DII and unhealthful PDI) are indices that score how unhealthily you eat.

The findings: over a median 12.2 years,

❝the unhealthier tertile of diet scores exhibited markedly elevated mortality risks, ranging from 1.99 to 2.07 based on the frailty index and 2.79 to 3.06 based on the frailty phenotype, compared to their robust counterparts in the healthier tertile.

Regardless of frailty categories, a healthier diet was associated with longer life expectancy and with lower mortality risk in a dose–response relationship.❞

What this means is: if we ranked every participant individually according to how healthily or unhealthily they ate, those in the bottom third of that list had a mortality rate 2–3x higher than those who scored in the top third of that healthy eating list.

Pre-existing frailty was, of course, a relevant factor, but as that bit where it says “regardless of frailty categories” makes clear, this goes for everyone regardless.

Further, “in a dose-response relationship” means that the more you eat healthily, the longer you live, the more you eat unhealthily, the sooner you die. Now, putting it in those words, this might not seem groundbreaking, but the numbers make this quite stark.

Another way of putting it is that the unhealthiest men with the poorest diets lost 1–4.5 years of life expectancy, and the unhealthiest women lost 0.5–5.1 years, with where one fits into that range depending on diet scores and frailty scores.

You can read the paper itself, here: Combined Effects of Diet Quality Scores and Frailty on All-Cause Mortality and Life Expectancy in Middle-Aged and Older Adults

Want to improve your diet and frailty scores?

Check out:

A New Contender For “Best Diet For Heart & Brain” In Aging

…plus:

100,000 People, 30 Years, One Clear Winner vs Aging

And for a very easy (for most us) boost: Coffee vs Frailty!

Enjoy!