Eating More Healthy Plant Foods Linked to Lower Type 2 Diabetes Risk in 192,000 People

Each 10% increase in a healthful plant-based diet score over four years was linked to a 9% lower risk of type 2 diabetes over the following four years, in a Harvard study of 192,567 people. People whose healthy plant-based eating fell the most had a 23% higher risk.

Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, led by Zhangling Chen with senior author Dr. Shilpa Bhupathiraju, followed women in the Nurses' Health Study and Nurses' Health Study II and men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, recording 12,627 cases of type 2 diabetes over almost three million person-years. The results are published in Diabetes Care.

Diet was assessed every four years. The healthful score rewards whole grains, fruit, vegetables, nuts and legumes. Weight changes explained only part of the link, and the benefit held whatever people's starting diet, as the full paper shows.

The authors conclude:

Improving adherence to overall and healthful plant-based diets was associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, whereas decreased adherence to such diets was associated with a higher risk.

So whatever your diet looks like now, adding more whole plant foods counts.

It echoes last August's study in which young adults who ate more plants had a 48% lower diabetes risk by middle age, and the same Harvard group's 2019 finding that improving a plant-based diet is linked to a 10% lower risk of death.

Every extra plant on the plate moves the needle.