{"id":960353,"date":"2026-11-06T09:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T09:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/960353\/"},"modified":"2026-11-06T09:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T09:12:11","slug":"nordic-diet-what-foods-are-included-and-the-health-benefits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/960353\/","title":{"rendered":"Nordic diet: What foods are included and the health benefits"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mediterranean diet<\/a> is generally considered the gold standard when it comes to improving health, but a northern version is now gaining popularity for its longevity benefits.<\/p>\n

Based on the traditional eating habits of people from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, the Nordic<\/a> diet features root vegetables, wholegrains, berries, oily fish<\/a> and lean meat.<\/p>\n

\"Trending<\/p>\n

The Nordic diet includes food like rye bread and salmon.\u00a0iStockphoto<\/p>\n

Nutritionist Joanna McMillan told Today that there are many similarities between the Mediterranean diet and the Nordic diet.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut because it\u2019s colder, it\u2019s the north and they have long, dark winters, what we do see is a lot more root vegetables; we see a lot more fermenting and pickling and preserving of foods because that\u2019s how they had to make food last through the dark winters,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ll find lots of cabbage and beetroot and potatoes and carrots, we\u2019ve even got some oats and barley. Rye bread is big, so rather than having white bread we\u2019ve got more of those dark rye, and there\u2019s great research behind rye and digestive health.\u201d<\/p>\n

Studies have shown the Nordic diet to slash the risk of dying by 36 per cent, as well as lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe strongest evidence for the health benefits of a Nordic diet comes from a 12-month study<\/a> in Sweden, a country with broadly similar eating habits to Denmark,\u201d Daniel Borch Ibsen, Christina C. Dahm and Michael Frid\u00e9n wrote in an article for The Conversation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cParticipants were asked to swap to porridge and rye bread instead of eating white bread and pasta, rapeseed oil instead of butter, and more locally grown produce like apples, berries and cabbage alongside fatty fish like salmon and herring.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this study, people in the Nordic diet group saw improvements across several risk factors for chronic disease compared to the people who weren\u2019t eating in this way. This included the lowering of high blood sugar and cholesterol, a reduction of liver fat, along with decreased inflammation levels \u2013 all of which can raise your chances of developing heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or liver disease over time.\u201d<\/p>\n

While some foods in the Nordic diet, such as reindeer meat and lingonberries, aren\u2019t readily available in Australian supermarkets, McMillan said there are easy swaps we can make, such as kangaroo and blueberries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got great red meat here in Australia, but substitute those lean options. We can certainly get the rye bread, we can get the oats, we can get barley, we can learn to use more of those foods rather than some of the ones we do here,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

McMillan did urge caution when considering whether the Nordic diet is worth incorporating into your own diet, noting that one category of food is only healthy for us in moderation.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the smoking and curing can lead to quite high salt in some of the products, so it doesn\u2019t mean that [the Nordic diet is] absolutely perfect, but it is that abundance of whole, fresh foods that seems to be really the underlying factor that\u2019s good for us,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Rather than strict adherence to the Nordic direct, McMillan recommended taking inspiration from it to make 80 per cent of your trolley full of fresh, frozen or canned fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean meat, and 20 per cent foods you eat occasionally.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Australia our biggest problem is far too much ultra-processed foods\u2026\u00a0 These are the foods that are not necessary, they\u2019re not part of our core foods that give us our nutrition\u2026 doesn\u2019t mean you can\u2019t have a little of what you fancy every now and again, of course you can.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Mediterranean diet is generally considered the gold standard when it comes to improving health, but a northern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":960354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[49,48,84,395],"class_list":["post-960353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-nutrition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=960353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/960353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/960354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=960353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=960353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=960353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}