Eating healthy pays off in longevity

Those with the best diets reduced their risk of death by up to 25 percent over a 10-year follow-up, said study author Ashima Kant, a professor of nutrition at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Kant and her colleagues extracted information from a National Institutes of Health/AARP database including more than 350,000 men and women, evaluating the link between dietary habits and their risk of death during the follow-up period.

"If you had the highest fifth of these scores, your risk of dying over the follow-up period was 20 to 25 percent lower," Kant said. She found gender differences, with women eating the healthiest reducing their risk of death by 25 percent and men reducing it by 20 percent.

Kant's team asked the participants about six components of a healthy diet, including intake of fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, whole grains, lean meat and poultry, and fat.

People didn't have to eat perfectly to get a top score, she said. For instance, "if a person had five or six servings of vegetables a week, that would get them the top score [for that question]," she said.

"It's not that you have to do everything [recommended under the dietary guidelines] to have any health benefits," she said, noting that participants in the groups with lower (but not the lowest) scores also tended to live longer. For instance, women who were in the second-from-the-highest group on dietary scores were 20 percent less likely to die and men in that group were 17 percent less likely.

The study is published in the July issue of The Journal of Nutrition.