Harvard's School of Public Health recently announced new research that reveals — are you sitting down? — that healthy eating in midlife is linked to healthy aging.

Yes. Several media sites ran with this mind-blowing news while failing, in a stark example of how rote health journalism is nowadays, to notice the disturbingly unhealthy aging revelations that lay further down in the researchers' findings.

What the Rest of the Media Missed

Though this research purports to show which dietary regimen promotes healthy aging, the vast majority of this massive cohort of 105,000 health professionals did not age well and, in fact, hit age 70 in demonstrably poor health (see screenshot below):

Only 9.3% made it to 70 with "intact" cognitive, mental and physical function and no chronic diseases. (There's a pronounced gender gap: though 11% of women in the study hit 70 in all-around good health; only 6% of men did.)

— Only 38% — barely a third — managed to survive to 70.

— Fewer than 1 out of 4 managed to avoid contracting a chronic disease.

— Only a third reached 70 with full cognitive function; fewer than a third had "intact physical function."

— Only about 1 in 4 study participants had a clean bill of mental health by 70.

Here's the background:

In a paper published in Nature Medicine, researchers from Harvard and the universities of Montreal and Copenhagen concluded that people who maintain diets that include more plant-rich foods have a greater chance of living into their 70s than people who eat more ultra-processed foods and red meat.

The research does contain several genuinely interesting insights into the diets, and specific foods and beverages, that it associated with greater or lesser chances of remaining healthy after 70.

The study examined data from 105,000 Americans, aged 39 to 69 (two-thirds women and about 95% white) who self-reported detailed dietary consumption every four years over the course of 30 years, from 1986 to 2016. This is a significant longitudinal data set, spanning decades, though one lacking demographic variety.

The dietary regime that was most greatly associated with "healthy aging," which the study defined as reaching age 70 with no cognitive, mental or physical problems or chronic disease, was the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI).

The strictly vegetarian diet had the weakest association with "healthy aging."

If the contemporary average life expectancy for a white American woman and man is 80 and 75, respectively (the study participants were overwhelmingly white), is it reasonable to assume that most Americans still breathing at 70 are not, and will not be in the future, in particularly good health?

What do these numbers say about the prospects of people now in midlife reaching, or living beyond, the rather young age of 70 without a chronic disease or significant cognitive, emotional and physical problems? During the roughly 75 years since many of the people in this study were born, American obesity rates for white men and women have exploded at least 4x, from under 10% at mid-century to 38% today. These rates, as well as those for severe obesity, have gotten only worse since 2016, when the data for this study concluded.

Altogether, the research highlights the complexity of nutrition research and reinforces that the relationships between foods and health outcomes aren't always as straightforward as commonly believed.

The study authors said their findings are best used not as a set of rigid rules but as guidance that people can use to build a dietary plan that fits their specific goals. But if the low "healthy aging" success rate indicated in this research is accurate, just getting to 70 clinically "intact" may be a bigger challenge, with a lower likelihood, than any of us had thought.

To find out more about Paul Von Zielbauer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Brooke Lark at Unsplash