This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

Got a minute?

Let's say your diet hasn't been 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 helpful changes now after the damage has presumably been done?

It is impressive that changes even very late in life,

such as even being older and having a heart attack.

Dietary change can within a matter of a few months drop our risk greatly of a recurrent

heart attack or death.

Walter Willitt, he chairs the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard TH 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.

So it's never too late to make important changes

for diabetes also, that if we change our diet almost

immediately our risk of diabetes goes down but that's not say you should just

wait till you're old to start living a healthy life we 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 healthy lifestyle early but if you

sort of ignored things it's never too late to still get some benefit.

The entire hour-long forum, featuring Willitt and other researchers discussing diet and health,

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