In another blow for enjoying ourselves, scientists have claimed that a hot dog could shorten your life expectancy by 36 minutes.
For some context, scientists also recently upgraded cigarettes’ lethality by claiming one can shorten your life by 20 minutes.
That would make hot dogs almost twice as dangerous as cigarettes in terms of time lost, although of course there aren’t many people chuffing through a 20-pack of them each day.
Of course, it’s no secret that hot dogs aren’t exactly health foods. They fall under the banner of ‘ultra-processed foods’ (UPFs), and those are increasingly a no-go for people who want to live a long and healthy life.
The 30-minute claim comes from food experts at the University of Michigan (UoM) who published a 2021 study covering a wide range of UPFs. Cured meats, pizza, and mac and cheese were also on the hit list, among others.
It claimed that hot dogs will set you back by 36 minutes each, cured meats will cost around 24 minutes, and a can of pop amounts to 12 minutes.
The study, available here, took a detailed approach to calculating these figures.
“We based our Health Nutritional Index on a large epidemiological study called the Global Burden of Disease, a comprehensive global study and database developed with the help of more than 7,000 researchers around the world,” said the UoM.
“The Global Burden of Disease determines the risks and benefits associated with multiple environmental, metabolic, and behavioral factors—including 15 dietary risk factors.
“Our team took that population-level epidemiological data and adapted it to the level of individual foods.
“Taking into account more than 6,000 risk estimates specific to each age, gender, disease, and risk—and the fact that there are about a half-million minutes in a year—we calculated the health burden that comes with consuming one gram’s worth of food for each of the dietary risk factors.”
The good news is that there are foods that can supposedly increase your healthy lifespan, too.
Certain types of fish could add up to 28 minutes per portion, and you won’t be surprised to learn that fruits and vegetables can increase your life expectancy too. Shockingly, peanut butter and jam sandwiches also fell into the life-extending bracket.
“The urgency of dietary changes to improve human health... is clear,” Dr Olivier Jolliet, the head of the study, told the Express.
"Our findings demonstrate that small, targeted substitutions offer a feasible and powerful strategy to achieve significant health and environmental benefits without requiring dramatic dietary shifts."
Featured Image Credit: Jena Ardell via Getty ImagesTopics: Health
Rachael Davis