One hot dog takes 36 minutes off your life, study finds

Every hot dog a person eats shortens their life by 36 minutes, according to a U.S. study.

However, we can also add minutes to our healthy life expectancy by eating better foods.

A portion of nuts, for example, adds almost 26 minutes, while a peanut butter and jam sandwich gives a person more than half an hour extra life.

The findings come from experts at the University of Michigan who created a standardized way of assessing the carbon footprint and nutritional impact of almost 6,000 foods.

Their Health Nutritional Index works by calculating the health burden of one gram of food, and scaling it up to a standard serving size.

“For example, we found that, on average, 0.45 minutes are lost per gram of any processed meat that a person eats in the U.S.,” the study authors wrote in an article published in The Conversation.

“The 61g of processed meat in a hot dog sandwich results in 27 minutes of healthy life lost due to this amount of processed meat alone. Then, when considering the other risk factors, like the sodium and trans fatty acids inside the hotdog — counterbalanced by the benefit of its polyunsaturated fat and fibres — we arrived at the final value of 36 minutes of healthy life lost per hotdog.”

Peanut butter and jam sandwiches were the best food for extending lifespan because of the high nut content, the researchers said — and the nuts outweighed any downsides of peanut butter.

However, for the British palate there was less good news, as simply having jam sandwiches would not have the same effect.

Each item of food contributes to a unique equation and a person does not need to make wholesale dietary changes to reap the rewards, researchers said.

For example, if a meat-eater decides to replace 10 per cent of their daily calories — 250 for men and 200 for women — with nuts, fruits and vegetables instead of processed meat or beef, they will gain 48 minutes of healthy life every day they stick to this change.

This simple adjustment, the researchers say, also has environmental benefits and can cut a person’s daily dietary carbon footprint by a third.

The study, published in the journal Nature Food, is based around healthy life expectancy, which is the length of time a person has a good quality of life and is disease-free. “The urgency of dietary changes to improve human health and the environment is clear,” said Prof. Olivier Jolliet. “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 Health Nutritional Index takes into account all aspects of a product’s life cycle, including how it is produced, harvested, processed, consumed and disposed of, as well as how nutritionally beneficial or detrimental it is.

Researchers gave each food a traffic-light rating. Salmon scored well for nutrition, adding 16 minutes to a person’s healthy life.

However, it got a red for environmental impact, and therefore a red overall, with people encouraged to decrease their consumption of the oily fish. Chili con carne with beans is another example of a food being bad for the environment, but good for health.

Cola, on the other hand, got a red for nutrition — stealing 12.5 minutes of life per drink — but a green for environmental impact.

“Previous studies have often reduced their findings to a plant vs. animal-based foods discussion,” said Katerina Stylianou, lead author of the study.

“Although we find that plant-based foods generally perform better, there are considerable variations within both plant-based and animal-based foods.”