Some foods could take minutes off your life, while others add minutes, says study

RESEARCHES have established a scale that ranks thousands of foods according to their health benefits. This nutritional health index is scaled in time: from 74 minutes lost to 80 gained depending on the portion ingested. In addition to nutritional qualities, this guide also includes environmental data.

Choosing your food wisely could allow you to slash your carbon footprint by a third and gain 48 healthy minutes per day.

Eat more vegetables, move more, opt for almond milk or oat milk... people have become passionate about nutrition, and as a result there are so many ideas about what is best for our bodies and our planet.

Therefore it has become very difficult to understand what is good for us.

To help us cut through the noise, researchers have published a new study on the quality of the food we eat.

And to make the results accessible and understandable to as many people as possible, this guide is not in the form of a nutri-score, but of a time scale.

This study, published in the scientific journal Nature Food, on August 18, 2021, analyzes 5,853 foods that are consumed in the United States, from leeks to hot dogs.

Not surprisingly, eating too much meat is bad for your health, these scientists outline in their analysis. A hot dog can thus cause a loss of 36 minutes of healthy life.

Red meat 6 minutes and 29 seconds. On the other hand, fruits can add 11 minutes and 54 seconds, vegetables 2 minutes and 10 seconds.

The study concludes that replacing just 10% of daily caloric intake from beef and processed meat with fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, and seafood could result in substantial health improvements of 48 minutes per person per day and a 33% reduction in the carbon footprint of eating. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

However, some findings from the study are more surprising. That American classic, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, for example, could add 33 minutes. That's three times more than fruit.

While candy could add 28 seconds of life while sugar causes loss of one second of life.

To justify the validity of their scale, the scientists specify that it is a theoretical scale, intended to apply better choices, without radically changing our diet.