Carbs in moderation healthy
Harvard study: Moderate pasta, bread eating lowers early death risk
Washington, Aug. 18: Cutting carbohydrates from the diet could actually increase the risk of an early death, a major study has found.
The findings suggest trendy diets which encourage slashing all bread, potatoes and pasta from the diet may actually do more harm than good.
But the study of 15,400 people, led by Harvard School of Public Health, found eating too many carbs is also damaging to health.
Instead, it suggests eating moderate levels of carbohydrates — enough to make up 50 to 55 per cent of the diet — is the healthiest.
People whose diet was made up of less than 40 per cent and or more than 70 per cent carbohydrates had a higher mortality risk.
If carbs make up 50 percent of your diet, you may well live longer, a Harvard study found
The study — published in the Lancet Public Health journal — goes some way to ending the decades- old debate about whether cutting carbs or fat is the best way to improve health.
The healthiest approach, it suggests, is to eat a balanced diet with nutrients in moderation.
And it raises concerns that the increasingly popular all- or- nothing ‘ exclusion’ diets can do severe damage to people's health.
The findings also support the advice of Public
Health England — which suggests starchy carbohydrates should form the main components of a healthy diet.
The US scientists also looked at the combined results of previous studies including 432,000 people from more than 20 countries, which confirmed their findings.
They found that the biggest risk of cutting carbohydrates was if people replaced it with meat and cheese.
If they instead started eating more plant- based food - such as vegetables, lentils, beans and nuts -
the risk was lower.
Researcher Dr Sara Seidelmann, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said: “We need to look really carefully at what are the healthy compounds in diets that provide protection.
“Low- carb diets that replace carbohydrates with protein or fat are gaining widespread popularity as a health and weight loss strategy.
“However, our data suggests that animal- based low carbohydrate diets, which are prevalent in North America and Europe, might be associated with shorter overall life span and should be discouraged.' The authors recruited 15,528 adults aged 45 to 64, and then tracked them for 25 years.”
Of the original group, 6,283 people died over the study period. But those who had low carb consumption were 20 per cent more likely to die than those with moderate consumption.
The researchers extrapolated these results to estimate that someone who was aged 50 with a moderate carbohydrate intake could expect to live another 33 years.
Those with a low carbohydrate intake could expect to live to 79 — four years fewer.
And those with a high carb intake could expect to live to 82, one year less than the moderate group.
Co- author Professor Walter Willett of Harvard School of Public Health, said: “These findings bring together several strands that have been controversial. Too much and too little carbohydrate can be harmful but what counts most is the type of fat, protein, and carbohydrate.”
And researcher Professor Scott Solomon of Harvard Medical School said: “This work provides the most comprehensive study of carbohydrate intake that has been done to date, and helps us better understand the relationship between the specific components of diet and long term health. These data suggest that shifting towards a more plant- based consumption is likely to help attenuate major morbid disease.”
Dr Andrew Mente from McMaster University in Canada, writing in a linked comment, said eating anything in moderation was advisable — and a ‘ U- shaped’ mortality curve could probably be seen for any nutrient.
He led a study published in the Lancet last year, which found that extremely low- fat diets could also do more harm than good.