Healthy Eating, Healthier Aging: New Research On The Connection Between Diet And Disease

If you find yourself confused these days as to what you should be prioritizing in your diet, you’re not alone. Earlier this year, the USDA revised its message for the 2025-2030 dietary guidelines, leaving many experts confused, if not distressed, about the science supporting these new recommendations. While the new guidelines emphasize whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, they also prioritize red meat, full-fat dairy, and other foods high in saturated fat. This runs counter to decades of scientific evidence, especially when it comes to the risk for heart disease, still the #1 killer of men and women in the US. In fact, newly published research appears to underscore how important diet is to lowering your risk of cardiac disease, along with such other diseases as cancer. As one expert boldly claimed, “If people combine a high-quality diet with exercise, no smoking, good blood pressure control and cholesterol levels, research suggests they can reduce the likelihood of having heart disease, including a heart attack, by 75% or 80%.”

According to a new study published in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, a diet low in either carbs or fat can reduce your risk of coronary heart disease significantly, as long as the carbs or fat that you do include are of high quality, i.e., nutrient-dense foods such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables, plant-based proteins, and healthy fats. In fact, diets that are considered “unhealthy,” i.e., those relying on refined grains and animal sources of fat and protein, high in saturated fats, put you at greater risk for coronary artery disease. Simply deciding to cut carbs or to cut fat from your diet is not paying sufficient attention to the nutrients your body needs to be healthy. It’s the quality of the foods you do eat that’s important for lowering your risk of coronary heart disease. As one expert states, “Health is not simply about cutting carbs or fat.” In fact, your body needs healthy fats from sources such as nuts or avocados, which give you energy and keep you full. In a recent article in The Washington Post, cardiologist Dariush Mozaffarian emphasized that healthy fats may be more important in your diet than protein, and that the healthiest fats come from plants: nuts, seeds, and plant oils (and it’s not true that seed oils are unhealthy for you). This advice is backed by both this new study and the broader scientific community, in contrast to the recommendations of the new food pyramid, which touts the benefits of saturated fats from red meat and other animal sources. For more on this new research, start chopping some veggies and click here.

Another new study, this time focused on the connection between diet and cancer, also found that a plant-forward diet, rather than one relying on animal products such as red meat, can lower your risk significantly for 5 different types of cancer. According to this research published in The British Journal of Cancer (which has been described as the largest study ever on the potential impact of diet on the development of cancer), those who eat a vegetarian diet have less chance than those who consume meat of developing pancreatic, breast, prostate, or kidney cancer, or multiple myeloma blood cancers. While the study found an association, not causation, it is more evidence of the growing connection between a plant-based diet and the cut in risk for some cancers. The study has been called a “landmark” and involved data from more than 1.8 million people tracked for multiple years. While it is unclear as to whether the avoidance of animal products or the nutrients in vegetarian diets is the reason for lowering the risk of these cancers, either way it suggests that your diet can have a direct implication for your risk of developing cancer. If you’re curious what an oncologist does and does not eat (including the avoidance of red and processed meats), grab your dinner plate and look here. And to bolster your understanding of which foods and drinks are linked to cancer, get ready to quiz yourself with a recent Wall Street Journal test here.