Can the food you eat help extend your life and improve your health?Plenty of research suggests that it can. Studies reveal that a healthy diet can help you sidestep ailments that plague people more as they age, including heart disease, hypertension, cancer, and cataracts. But information gleaned from news flashes, best-selling diet books, and even government sources is often contradictory. And occasionally scientific studies blown out of proportion in the news or in popular diet books make dietary divas or pariahs of certain foods.
Will tripling your intake of olive oil or banishing carbohydrate-laden breads from your menu ward off illness? Taken alone, these steps simply can’t do enough to help. To reap dietary benefits, you gradually must work in more sweeping changes, such as cutting down on red meat; eating more vegetables, fruits, and whole grains; and striking a healthy balance between calories in and calories out.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand what changes you should be making in your diet is to review the healthy eating recommendations made by Professor Walter C. Willett in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating (see Healthy Eating Recommendations). As you may notice, these recommendations share a good deal with new government dietary guidelines for Americans issued in January 2005, a vast improvement on the seriously outdated USDA food pyramid that had held sway since 1992. There are, however, key differences, such as Willett’s recommendations for choosing healthy fats and his more marked emphasis on a diet built largely around plants and whole grains. In addition, the healthy eating guidelines described in this section encourage a more limited intake of dairy products, as well as a combination of poultry, fish, beans, or nuts rather than red meat.
