The Food Health Connection: Healthy Eating A Guide To The New Nutrition

Content provided by the Faculty of the Harvard Medical School

The food-health connection

The foods you eat every day can have a tremendous effect on your health. Decades of research have produced study after study showing links between diet and serious illness. A healthy diet has the power to prevent heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, some forms of cancer, blindness, and birth defects. It does matter whether your breakfast is a doughnut or a bowl of oatmeal, whether your sandwich is ham and cheese or hummus and tomato, and whether dinner is steak or salmon. Dozens of other food choices you make can affect how long — and how well — you live.

The influence of diet on heart disease and some forms of cancer is well-known. But determining which foods have the greatest effects has not been easy. The search for the diet-heart connection has been fruitful, but attempts to establish links between cancer and diet have had less success. For example, pooling of data from the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study showed that a diet high in fruits and vegetables has strong benefits for the heart but no significant benefits for cancer prevention. This doesn't mean that certain nutrients, vitamins, or types of food don't have an effect, but rather that the specifics have been more difficult to pin down than expected.

Healthy eating can prevent disease.

The following sections describe the health conditions that are most strongly influenced by your diet. For each disease, you'll find a list of foods and nutrients that can lower your risk of developing that disease as well as a list of foods or food components that can raise your risk.

Last updated:	January 23, 2007