Eating a hot dog could take 36 minutes off your life, study says

(CNN) – You may want to skip the seasonings in your next hot dog or hot dog, or skip it altogether: Health researchers at the University of Michigan found that eating just one hot dog could take 36 minutes off your life.

In their study, published this month in the journal Nature Food, the researchers analyzed 5,853 foods in the American diet and measured their effects on minutes of healthy life gained or lost.

“We wanted to do a health-based assessment of the beneficial and harmful impacts of foods on the entire diet,” Olivier Jolliet, professor of environmental health sciences at the university and lead author of the paper, told CNN.

The team developed an index that calculates the net beneficial or harmful health burden in minutes of healthy living associated with a serving of food. It is based on a study called Global Burden of Disease, which measures the morbidity associated with a person’s food choices.

“For example, 0.45 minutes are lost per gram of processed meat or 0.1 minutes are gained per gram of fruit. We then look at the composition of each food and then multiply this number by the corresponding food profiles that we developed earlier.” Jolliet said.

One of the foods the 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 such as sodium and trans fatty acids were included, the final value was 36 minutes lost.

Consuming foods like nuts, legumes, shellfish, fruits, and non-starchy vegetables, on the other hand, has positive health effects, the study found.

The index looks at foods that increase or decrease life expectancy, but it’s not as easy as trying to swap bad food choices for more beneficial ones, Jolliet said.

“The index is there primarily to help select and use the calories consumed on a daily basis to change a minimum of habits and make the minimum of change to obtain the maximum benefit for health and the environment from our experience with food,” he said Jolliet.

The point is to choose better foods, not to waste time calculating, he said.

“Is it the ultimate metric that will tell you exactly what to eat tomorrow and completely determine your life expectancy? No,” he said. “It’s a useful metric that can help you make more informed decisions and makes it easy to identify and make appropriate small changes to our diet.”

It’s also not as easy as figuring out what foods to eat to live to be 100, said Marion Nestlé, a professor of nutrition and public health at New York University. She told CNN that the numbers may not be entirely reliable.

“Changing a diet to include or exclude any food is unlikely to make much of a difference – it’s dietary (and lifestyle) patterns that count,” he said. “I suppose you could argue that minutes are piling up, but that goes into more untested and unverifiable assumptions.”