Your Early Death Risk Increases If You Don't Eat This Vegetarian Protein Source

People in the United States can expect to live an average of 77.5 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While uncontrollable factors such as your family history, traffic accidents, and environmental conditions can shorten your lifespan, other factors you can control can increase your risk of an earlier death. Smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, heavy alcohol use, and lack of physical exercise can lead to chronic diseases that might cut years off your life expectancy.

You also can't ignore how you feed your body if you want to live a longer, healthy life. A 2019 study in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that people who closely follow a plant-based diet can lower their risk of cardiovascular death by 19% and early death by 11%.

A plant-based diet doesn't mean gorging on only fruits and vegetables. It means you derive most of your food from plants while reducing the meat and dairy on your plate. According to a 2023 meta-analysis in Advances in Nutrition, eating more plant-based protein sources, such as legumes, can reduce your risk of early death by 6%.

Legumes include lentils, soybeans, black beans, chickpeas, and peanuts, and they have plenty of nutrients that can improve your health. For example, a cup of chickpeas has just 269 calories with more than 14 grams of protein and less than a gram of saturated fat. Legumes are also known for their high fiber, and chickpeas provide more than 12 grams per serving. Legumes are also good for you because they're typically low in sodium, and high in potassium and magnesium to help reduce your blood pressure.

The researchers in the 2023 meta-analysis in Advances in Nutrition attribute their results to legumes' ability to reduce cholesterol, blood sugar, and appetite, which all can factor into your mortality risk. Soluble fiber in beans lowers cholesterol by binding with bile acids and removing them from the body. Your body then uses the cholesterol in your blood to make new bile acids, which means you won't have as much cholesterol to clog your arteries. Legumes also have phytosterols and other substances that lower cholesterol.

Legumes can also keep your blood sugar under control because of their fiber and resistant starch that slow the rate of digestion. The protein and fiber in beans also help you feel full so you'll eat less and lose weight. The more beans you eat, the better. For every 50 grams (about ⅓ cup) of beans you eat per day, you'll see a 6% lower risk of premature death.

Even if you still like to eat animal products, replacing some of your butter, eggs, and red meat with plant-based proteins, such as nuts and legumes, can boost your health, according to a 2023 meta-analysis in BMC Medicine. You'll cut your risk of cardiovascular disease by 23% if you swap out processed meat (like bacon, pepperoni, and hot dogs) for legumes. Substituting legumes for processed meat or eggs reduces your early death risk by 9% and 10%, respectively.

It's not too late to improve the quality of your diet to improve your longevity. In a 2017 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers tracked the quality of the diets of more than 70,000 people over 12 years. A high-quality diet was based on higher consumption of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, lean proteins, and whole grains while limiting saturated fats and alcohol. Those who had improved the quality of their diet by as little as 13% had lowered their death risk by as much as 16%.

The more you improve your diet quality, the more you'll reduce your risk of death from any disease.