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Scientists have mapped the toll your food can take on your life expectancy.
And they have found that eating a handful of nuts each day could help you gain 26 minutes of healthy life. In contrast a hotdog could cost you 36 minutes.
Researchers at the University of Michigan evaluated almost 6,000 foods for the study published in the journal Nature Food.
Their results ranked foods by their nutritional disease burden to humans as well as their impact on the wider environment.
They found that by replacing just 10% of your daily food intake from beef and processed meats with a mix of fruit, nuts, vegetables, and seafood your dietary carbon footprint could be reduced by 30%.
That would allow people to gain 48 healthy minutes each day.
Dietary recommendations rarely take into account the carbon footprint and nutritional impact of our food choices.
Their Health Nutritional Index calculates the health burden of one gram of food and then scales it up to a standard serving size.
Olivier Jolliet, senior author, and professor of environmental health services at the university’s School of Public Health, said: “Our findings demonstrate that small, targeted substitutions offer a feasible and powerful strategy to achieve significant health and environmental benefits without requiring dramatic dietary shifts.”
The researchers are working with partners in Switzerland, Brazil, and Singapore to develop similar systems with the aim of expanding their findings to countries all around the world.
