Spread that PB&J and live a little longer
Hold the fries?
Not so fast. New research is suggesting that, from a nutrition perspective, the fries might not be so bad.
Keep the fries and, instead, hold the hot dog. Or, in fact, any kind of sandwich (yes, we know a hot dog isn’t a sandwich) that contains red meat or processed meat. Burgers, we’ll miss you most of all.
Why? Because researchers at the University of Michigan crunched the numbers on 5,800 common foods to see which were healthiest and promised to extend our lifespan and which ones were the least healthy and threatened to snatch minutes away from us.
And, in terms of nutritional value, the hot dog placed dead last since, for every one we eat, we risk losing 36 minutes of “healthy” life. And, if a little over a half-hour doesn’t seem like much time to lose, consider that 40 hot dogs could cost you a full day.
Think a breakfast sandwich is a good compromise? Think again. Each one of those is estimated to shorten our lives by 13 minutes. Just 110 of them translates into an entire day. Assuming we ever travel again, what are we supposed to eat at the airport?
Perhaps we have to pack up our own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which appear to be the ideal substitute — every life-giving PB&J not only gives us the gift of sweet nostalgia and comfort food, it also gifts us an extra half-hour. Give or take.
“When we do the analysis, we don’t necessarily see all the effects of any food on the body mass index, but it’s (the PB&J) beneficial because of the peanuts,” explains Olivier Jolliet, PhD, and professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “This is really the reason, not the jam. And the bread is probably neutral, although, if it’s a whole grain bread, it’s a little bit better.”
There’s obviously a little room for error when it comes to individual foods, but the idea is that when you look at a nutritional label, it’s hard to know how bad (or good) three grams of any particular element of the food actually is. Fortunately, the Global Burden of Disease, an international research program that assesses risk factors associated with specific additives and microand macronutrients, does, so Jolliet and team used that to calculate the net-positive or net-negative value of nearly 6,000 grocery store items, including 78 different frozen pizzas. (Pizza with meat toppings have a net-negative value, whereas veggie pizzas are neutral.)
While it’s neat to look at the individual food rankings and debate the merits of eating hot dogs, given the unknowns and margins for error, it’s almost certainly more valuable to look at the bigger picture. If you scan all the foods, the big takeaway is that we need to eat more plants. Processed meats, red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages are all linked to health problems that shorten our lifespan and, on the other end of the spectrum, nuts and seeds, fruits and legumes are linked to longer healthy lives (24, 10 and eight minutes, respectively).
What makes this study even more interesting, though, is that it also ranks the food according to its impact on the environment — pollution, water use and greenhouse gas emissions, among others. And, for a lot of foods, what’s good for us is also good for the planet. And for an increasing number of people, that’s an important factor in dietary choices.
“We want people to look at personal health and then, in addition, when we can reduce our diet footprint, we should look at that, too,” says Jolliet. “In many cases, there are synergies, so the people who eat vegetarian automatically will have a relatively reasonable carbon footprint, because you reduce it when you eliminate meat.”
In particular, red meat (especially beef ) which, along with processed meat had some of the worst scores — both for environmental and health impacts. Lamb and pork were slightly better choices, but poultry and dairy ranked significantly higher than red meat, when it came to both health and the environment. That said, there are nuances within all these categories, such as white or dark meat and how salty the cheese is, but Jolliet says we’d be well-advised to save red meat for special occasions.
“For fish, it’s not so simple, since we are overfishing, which is a problem for the environment and for the species, but it’s really beneficial for our health,” says Jolliet. “We need more aquaculture and for these systems to become much more like a closed loop, because
When you look at a nutritional label, it’s hard to know how bad (or good) three grams of any particular element actually is
things like antibiotics get into the environment and so we need to make progress on that front.”
Aside from the peanut butter sandwich and the complexities of aquaculture, there were a few other surprises when the final tallies came in.
“French fries coming out on the good side was a surprise, but it depends how much salt you put on it and the oil used, but they are close to neutral,” he says. “The shrimp did not come out well for the carbon footprint I was surprised that it was that high and it was a bit beneficial for health but not that beneficial.”
Possibly the biggest surprise, though, was that this academic research went viral so quickly after it was published. Many major news outlets picked it up and it was shared widely.
“We have a lot of likes and reactions to our research when it’s been covered in the news,” he says, “But we have a lot of people not liking it at all and reacting negatively, like ‘Don’t touch my hot dogs.’ ”
“But at least they react,” he adds, “I mean, it might make them think about it differently.”