Healthy Diet Cuts Medical Costs

 A study indicates that individuals who maintain nutritious eating patterns tend to incur 9% lower medical expenses compared to those who do not.

On the 21st, a faction within the medical field, headed by Park Min-sun—a family medicine professor at Seoul National University Hospital—validated this through an examination of the relationship between the diets of 1,144 adults and their yearly healthcare costs using information from the National Health and Nutrition Survey spanning 2016 to 2021.

The research team categorized participants into four quintiles based on the "food life evaluation index" and assessed the annual healthcare expenditures for each category. They eliminated variables that could influence costs, including gender, age, income, and chronic conditions.

The dietary evaluation index serves as a metric that quantitatively reflects the overall meal quality. It assesses 14 dietary categories, scored with a perfect benchmark of 100. Higher scores are attributed to increased consumption of fruits and vegetables, preference for white meat over red meat, and a greater intake of brown rice relative to white rice.

Conversely, lower scores result from reducing sodium, alcohol, and soda intake.

Consequently, the research revealed that the group with the highest dietary index had an average of 8.6% lower total medical costs than the group with the lowest dietary index, with outpatient expenses being 12.1% and inpatient costs 8% lower.

This pattern was notably pronounced among younger individuals.

By splitting the two demographics based on the median age of the 1,144 participants, the research explored the link between diet and healthcare expenses, discovering that healthy eating among those under 57 could diminish medical costs by 11.5%.

In contrast, for older adults, the team speculated that the effect of lowering medical expenditures might have been lessened due to acute health issues stemming from accumulated nutritional deficits, falls, and infections.

These results were published in the international journal Nutrients.

HEALTH AND SUPLIMENTS