Live longer: avoid  processed meats

By Dr. Michael Greger

 

If you care about your health so much that it would be unthinkable to light up a cigarette before and after lunch, maybe you should order a bean burrito instead of a meaty one.

According to the Global Burden of Disease Study, diets high in processed meat, like bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage, may kill more than 100,000 people every year, due largely to heart disease, but also cancer and diabetes. This results in millions of healthy years of life lost every year around the world.

It doesn’t take much either. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that if Americans could cut down to just an ounce of processed meat a week, thousands of cancer deaths could be averted every year.

In the Annals of Internal Medicine, analyses determined that a reduction in red and processed meat consumption is in fact associated with a 13% lower risk of premature death, let me introduce the concept of microlives.

Acute risks, like skydiving or riding a motorbike, could result in an accident. A good way to compare such risks is with a unit known as a micromort, defined as a one-in-a-million chance of sudden death. (-However many risks we take don’t kill straight away: think of all the lifestyle frailties , such as smoking, drinking, eating badly, not exercising, and so on. The microlife aims to make all these chronic risks comparable by showing how much life we lose on average when we’re exposed to them: a microlife is 30 minutes of your life expectancy.”

 Someone in their 20s——may have, on average, about 57 years of life left. That’s about 20,000 days, or 500,000 hours, or a million half hours. So, that’s how they define a microlife—a reduction of one of the million half hours we may have left. What would, on average, cost a 30-year-old man one microlife?

Drinking a pint of strong beer shortens your life expectancy as much as smoking one cigarette would. If it’s unthinkable to have so little respect for your own health that you’d light up twice a day, then it should be just as unthinkable to be 11 pounds overweight.

Alternatively, you can compare life-extending behaviors. For example, eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day may add an average of four years onto your lifespan for men and three years for women. That’s up to twice as beneficial as exercising every day. But exercise for 20 minutes, and the payoff is an extra hour of life. So, for everyone who says they don’t have time to exercise, it’s like a 3-to-1 return on investment! Give 20 minutes of your life to 60 minutes of life. Beyond that, there’s a bit of diminishing returns, but exercise an hour a day and get back more time than you put in.

So, what about meat? Each burger is associated with the loss of one microlife; it’s as if each burger were taking 30 minutes off your life. So, in terms of your lifespan, one burger appears to equal two cigarettes. If lighting up at lunch seems unimaginable, maybe a bean burrito is a better choice.

Processed meat is even worse. Here are a few ways to put it into perspective: Imagine two people who are completely identical except in one way: One person eats about 50 grams of processed meat a day (one large sausage or a few strips of bacon), and the other eats none. Eating that single serving of processed meat every day is expected to shorten that first person’s life by about two years. That’s two less years with loved ones, grandkids, or a spouse. Eating a bologna or ham sandwich every day is expected to take about an hour off life each day. If there never seem to be enough hours in the day, you may effectively have one less depending on what you pack for lunch.

To improve human and planetary health dietary guidelines should continue to emphasize dietary patterns low in red and processed meats and high in minimally processed plant foods such as fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes,” that is, beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils.

Dr. Dean Ornish said about papers that suggested people should continue to eat meat with abandon.

“I take solace, “in knowing that the light drives out the darkness. But, these days, the light has to be very bright indeed. Caveat emptor. Don’t be fooled. Your life may depend on it.”