Foods to help you live longer
Medical advancements have enabled us to live longer with freedom from much of the disease that has ravaged our ancestors. With foods in abundance and physical activity designed out of our daily lives, new diseases have emerged including our biggest grim reaper – heart disease.
There have been many developments of new pills to counteract the life threatening effects of heart disease, such as cholesterol lowering and blood pressure stabilizing medications. But one of the problems faced by people with lifestyle related disease is the multitude of pills they need to consume each day.
One group of scientists have believed to have solved this problem by creating the ‘polypill’ by combining medications to reduce a range of lifestyle related symptoms in one hit. Sounds great? But one of the big problems is the side effects of medicines and it is thought that combining one pill may create more undesirable side effects in itself.
According to a group of Dutch Researchers the solution is simple, go for a natural means within your diet. They analysed the health benefits of foods from a large group of people in the US based Framingham study.
The foods picked for the ‘polymeal’ were predicted to increase lifespan, reduce heart disease and reduce the amount of years a person would live with heart diseased if it developed. The results were detailed down to the amounts recommended and they calculated the number of extra years gained if these foods were eaten daily from age 50.
The foods, amounts, and percentage reduction of heart disease risk from eating each, and the combination of all, is shown below:
From the results it was believed that men would benefit most from this type of diet – but then they are expected to live about five years less than women anyway, so this would help close the gap.
It is important not to include additives to the above recommendations to get best health effect. For example eating the nuts with salt will probably make you eat more than the above amount and could even add to blood pressure over the longer term.
Of course this also assumes that these foods aren’t added to by extra fatty, sugary and high energy-dense foods. If this is the case, and given that the foods that make up the polymeal could hardly be called unpalatable, there’s little excuse. Just sit down to a polymeal each day and enjoy the foods that could help you live longer.
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