If – like me – you have eaten a few hotdogs at the Royal Easter Show over the years, you may want to look away now.
Researchers at Michigan University have evaluated the ‘health burden’ of popular foods – and found that every hot dog a person eats shortens their life by 36 minutes.
Study author Professor Olivier J Jolliet and his team came to this conclusion by creating a standardised way of assessing the carbon footprint and nutritional impact of almost 6,000 foods.
Foods were then classified into three colour zones: green, yellow and red, similar to a traffic light.
Processed meats were a ‘red’ alert.
“For example, we found that, on average, 0.45 minutes are lost per gram of any processed meat that a person eats in the US,” stated the study, which is published in Nature Food.
“The 61 grams 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 hot dog – counterbalanced by the benefit of its polyunsaturated fat and fibres – we arrived at the final value of 36 minutes of healthy life lost per hot dog.”
We have to admit it’s a killjoy – I have eaten all the life-reducing products (listed above).
The good news though is that we also eat food which increases our life span.
A portion of nuts, for example, adds almost 26 minutes, and according to the researchers, a peanut butter and jam sandwich gives a person more than half an hour of extra life.
You also don’t need to make radical changes to your diet to reap the benefits.
The researchers say if you substitute 10 per cent of your daily kilojoule intake of beef and processed meat – 250 for men and 200 for women – with nuts, fruits and vegetables instead, you will gain 48 minutes of healthy life for every day you maintain this change.
Time to ‘go green’ then?
