Consuming a low-fat diet full of healthy foods during middle age may lengthen your life, a new study suggests.
In contrast, a healthy low-carbohydrate eating pattern did not lead to much of an improvement in longevity, according to the analysis of dietary data from more than 370,000 middle-aged and older adults published in the Journal of Internal Medicine.
“Following healthy low-fat diet with minimal intake of saturated fat can be an effective approach to promoting healthy aging among middle-aged and older individuals,” says lead study author Yimin Zhao, Ph.D., researcher in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Peking University’s School of Public Health.
“The results from our study suggest that both fat quantity and quality are important determinants of health effects in middle-aged and older people,” Zhao tells TODAY.com via email. “We recommend that people should limit fat intake, even if they are trying to only consume healthy fat.”
The new study comes on the heels of a new evaluation of popular diets by the American Heart Association, which rated DASH, Mediterranean, vegetarian and pescatarian diets as the most heart healthy, while giving mid-range scores to low-fat and low-carb diets.
Low-carb versus low-fat diets
To take a closer look at the impact of low-fat and low-carb diets on longevity, Zhao and his colleagues analyzed data from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, which in 1995 and 1996 recruited AARP members ages 50 to 71 from six states: California, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina and Louisiana. For that study, researchers asked participants to fill out a 124-item food questionnaire.
For their analysis, Zhao and his colleagues excluded participants who reported having cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, end-stage kidney disease, poor health status, needed someone to fill out the questionnaire for them, or ate an extraordinarily high number of calories, which left 371,159 participants. The…
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