It’s amazing! Almost every day there’s another study published about how switching to a plant-based diet can help you fight off the worst diseases and conditions our modern world can throw at us. And today is no different…
It’s one of the most emphatic recommen-dations from the scientific sphere yet. A new study published in the journal Nature Communications confims which countries boast the highest longevity rates – and why…
What they did
A ream from the University of Sydney (UoS) (Aus) wanted to find out, once and for all, just how important the impact of plant-based versus animal-based proteins was on the average person’s diet world-wide. So they undertook a truly massive analysis of, “food supply and demographic data over a 60-year period (from 1961 to 2018) for 101 countries.”
Data sets, “encompassed information on the amount of food produced in each country as well as the average levels of calories, proteins, and fats available to citizens.”
The researchers also aimed to ensure that the selected countries were as regionally diverse as pos-sible, according to a feature in Food & Wine. The goal was to produce an accurate a picture as could be obtained, by reflecting a variety of food systems and cuisines, including regions with higher ani-mal protein consumption (notably, the U.S. and Australia) and areas where plants already serve as the primary source of protein, such as Pakistan and Indonesia.
What they found
After correcting the data to account for varying national data sets to account for population sizes and wealth, the tram discovered that, “countries where overall availability of plant-based proteins were higher, such as India, had relatively longer life expectancies than countries where animal-based pro-teins were more readily available, such as the US.”
The overall keyword identified by the study was ‘beans’. And the pattern of highest life expectancy’ cultures followed closely the global map of so-called Blue Zones, which we’ve explored in this space previously.
One pattern-busting finding was that child mortality rates were lower in areas where folks ate more animal fats and proteins. The reason, the team speculated, was that kids may need more of the con-centrated fats and proteins animal foods provide during their ‘growing’ years than plant sources can provide.
The takeaway
One after another, new studies probing associations between longevity and diet confirm that folks who consume predominantly or entirely plant-based diets live longer and prosper more.
My take
One wonders whether nature – or whatever you want to call the all-pervading universal life force – is trying to tell us to get on with it, and make the Great Shift to plants from animals without further delay…
~ Maggie J.