Enjoy Hot Dogs for a Shorter Life

 

Mystery cylinders. Ground up scraps of beef and pork with salt and food coloring and "binders". Hot dogs! Who doesn't love 'em? Perhaps the researchers at the University of Michigan who have concluded that eating a single hot dog could take 36 minutes off your life. But first, some context.

Hot dogs were only one of the more than 5,800 common foods in the US diet included in the study. For each one, the researchers measured their effects in minutes of healthy life gained or lost. The study, published in the journal Nature Food, ranked the foods by their nutritional disease burden to humans and their impact on the environment. It found that substituting just 10% of daily caloric intake from beef and processed meats for a mix of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and select seafood could reduce your dietary carbon footprint by one-third and allow people to gain 48 minutes of healthy life per day. 

This was an observational study, which means it does not prove that each hot dog that a person eats costs them 36 minutes off their life. It only showed that those who do eat them did.

"We wanted to make a health-based evaluation of the beneficial and detrimental impacts of the food in the entire diet," said Olivier Jolliet, professor of environmental health sciences at the university and senior author of the paper.

One of the foods researchers measured was a standard beef hot dog on a bun. Its 61 grams of processed meat resulted in the loss of 27 minutes of healthy life, Jolliet said, but when ingredients like sodium and trans fatty acids were factored in, the final value was 36 minutes lost

Does this mean its time to panic and give up hot dogs? Well giving up highly processed meat would not be a bad idea at all but no, that is not what the study recommends. "Changing a diet to include or exclude any one food is unlikely to make much difference -- it's dietary patterns that count," said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and public health at New York University. "I suppose you could argue that the minutes add up, but that gets into further untested and untestable assumptions."

So what does the study suggest?

"I wouldn't get too worried about eating a hot dog from this," Jolliet said. "Basically, we were trying to show how you can improve your lifestyle and the environment without necessarily trying to be vegan." Making small changes and adjustments can add up to big results.