A study found that cutting out sugar and processed meat helped people live longer

Several years ago, the ageless Cher did a gym commercial. There she looked incredibly graceful and charming, and she said: “If it came in a bottle, everyone would look like that.”

It was promoting gym memberships, but the message was that you are fit and need to exercise your body. This means that real physical change takes effort. The same goes for health and longevity.

There have always been companies selling nutritional supplements for better health. They market their products saying that all the ingredients are natural and that they are made with real foods and herbs.

But the bottom line is that you should still eat delicious, nutritious foods for optimal health and longevity. This has been supported again in research published this month in Nature’s food.

The data and analyzes for this study come from the United Kingdom. The researchers wanted to determine how changes in food intake increased life expectancy for different age groups.

They hypothesize that adherence to the Eatwell Guide, the British version of our dietary guidelines, would translate into gains in life expectancy at different stages of life. In fact, they call it the dietary patterns associated with longevity.

They developed a tool to estimate changes in life expectancy with changes in dietary choices. Their findings were that 40-year-olds who adhere to an eating pattern associated with longevity can add three years to their life expectancy with improved diet. People with unhealthy eating patterns can gain 10 years with eating pattern changes linked to longevity.

For 70-year-old men and women, switching from an unhealthy diet to a life-extending diet can add about three to four years to your life expectancy. The message here is that it is not too late.

You know what comes next: Consuming fewer sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meats and eating more whole grains and nuts is estimated to lead to the greatest improvements in life expectancy.

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