科学美国人60秒 SSS 论人生晚年健康饮食的重要性（在线收听）

Healthful Diet Switch Helps Even Late in Life 论人生晚年健康饮食的重要性

Let’s say your diet has been not so great. Maybe too much red meat, especially processed meat. Maybe too many sugary soft drinks. And maybe you’ve been eating like that for decades. So what’s the point of trying to make some healthful changes now, after the damage has presumably been done?

假如你的饮食还可以吧。也许有很多的红肉，特别是加工肉类。也许还有很多的糖类饮料。可能几十年来，你一直吃这样的食物。那么，在伤害造成之后，尝试健康的饮食，这些改变的意义在哪里呢?

“It is impressive that changes even very late in life, such as even being older and having a heart attack, a dietary change can within a matter of a few months drop our risk greatly of a recurrent heart attack or death.”

这些改变，在人类晚年会产生重大的影响。例如，年迈身患心脏病，改善饮食可以在数个月内大大降低心脏病复发或者死亡的风险。

Walter Willett. He chairs the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He spoke at a January 15th forum on Cancer and Diet that wound up touching on diet and health in general.

沃尔特·威力，是哈佛大学公共卫生学院营养系的主席。他在1月15日的“癌症和饮食的论坛”上发表讲话。该论坛通常涉及饮食和健康的内容。

“So it’s never too late to make important changes. For diabetes also, if we change our diet almost immediately our risk of diabetes goes down. But that’s not to say you just should just wait `til you’re old to start living a healthy life. We’re seeing in some studies now that what women ate as adolescents, especially if they ate a lot more red meat, that affected breast cancer risk later in their life. So it’s definitely important if you want the healthiest overall life is to start a healthy lifestyle early. But if you’ve sort of ignored things it’s never too late to still get some benefit.”

“亡羊补牢，为时不晚。对于糖尿病来说，也是这样。如果改变自己的饮食习惯，我们患糖尿病的风险会立刻降低。但是这并不是表明，直到老了之后才需要开始健康的生活。一些研究表明，一些女性在青少年时期，食入大量的红肉，就会影响其晚年患乳腺癌的几率。所以，如果想要生活健康，尽可能早的选择一种健康的生活方式是绝对重要的。 但是，如果你经常忘记这样做，现在开始也不晚!”

The entire hour-long forum featuring Willett and other researchers discussing diet and health is archived on line. Just google “Harvard public health forum”.

关于威力和其他研究人员对“饮食和健康”的详细讨论内容，请在谷歌搜索‘Harvard public health forum’。