Most of us have heard of the Mediterranean diet and its many health benefits, but there is another European diet that might also help you live longer.
It’s called the Nordic diet and it’s based on the traditional foods of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
It shares many elements with the Mediterranean diet, but it is essentially the cold climate version. It is sometimes called the “Northern Mediterranean diet.”
Meals are primarily plant-based and typically emphasize foods traditional to Nordic culture, such as oily fish and root vegetables.
This means choosing canola oil over olive oil, oats and rye over wheat and rice, and pears and apples over oranges and bananas.
Now a new study adds to the growing evidence that a healthy Nordic diet can help you live longer.
Danish researchers took health data from more than 64,000 middle-aged and older Swedish adults and used it to mimic a long-term randomized trial comparing dietary interventions.
Their hypothetical analysis estimates that strictly following a healthy Nordic diet could significantly reduce the risk of death from any cause over 24 years.
The results are published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
They support a 2025 systematic review that found that people whose dietary habits were more aligned with the Nordic diet had lower risks of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and cancer mortality compared to those with lower adherence.
The findings also partly support a recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Swedish adults with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
In this trial, some participants replaced white bread and pasta with porridge and rye bread. They used canola oil instead of butter and ate locally grown produce like apples, berries and cabbage. They also ate fatty fish like salmon.
Those who followed this healthy Nordic diet outperformed the 2012 Nordic dietary recommendations in terms of reductions in liver fat, liver enzyme markers, body weight, blood sugar and lipid markers.
“The healthy Nordic diet showed the best results in the diabetic study participants; just over 20% of their liver fat was reduced and their blood sugar (glucose) control improved over one year,” said lead author of the RCT study, Ulf Risérus of Uppsala University in Sweden, in 2025.
“More than half of the participants also experienced remission of their fatty liver disease. This makes these findings just as important for people with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease as for those with type 2 diabetes.”
Compared to the Mediterranean diet, there is much less research on the long-term health associations of the Nordic diet and, unfortunately, research takes time.
The recent Danish study is not a clinical trial, but is a nifty statistical shortcut to study the long-term potential of the Nordic diet without waiting for a 20-year trial to end.
The researchers thus compared the Nordic nutritional recommendations to a more traditional Nordic diet.
Interestingly, the new study found no clear reduction in serious liver problems when following a healthy Nordic diet compared to the 2023 Nordic health recommendations.
But the study found a significant difference in all-cause mortality estimates.
Compared to general health recommendations, the healthy Nordic diet was linked to a 4 percent lower risk of dying from any cause over the next 24 years.
Compared with no dietary intervention, this was linked to a 6% lower risk of all-cause mortality.
By zooming in on specific subgroups, researchers found evidence that some people might benefit more from a healthy Nordic diet than others.
The group with the best estimated mortality outcomes included a slightly higher proportion of women and adults over 65 years of age with hypertension and diabetes.
While those who exercised at least two hours a week and consumed less alcohol were less represented in this group.
This type of nuance will, however, have to be verified in future tests. This particular study relies on hypothetical interventions that keep a person strictly on the same diet for decades.
But the Nordic diet and the Mediterranean diet are more connected than they are apart, and the Mediterranean diet is also linked to a significantly lower risk of disease and death.
The lead author of the recent study, Michael Fridén of Aarhus University, believes there is good reason to suspect that traditional Nordic diets, rich in berries, unsaturated fats and dietary fiber, are good for human health.
Fridén recently wrote an article for The Conversation with Christina C. Dahm and Daniel Borch Ibsen explaining why the Nordic diet could help you live longer – and more sustainably, too.
“For people living in northern Europe, such as the UK, this more Nordic way of eating may actually be an easier diet to follow than the Mediterranean diet, given that many ingredients are already locally grown and familiar,” the trio writes.
“Plus, because it relies on food grown and caught close to home, rather than food imported from far away, this way of eating tends to do more to support local food production, making it potentially better for the climate.”
A possible two for one.
The research was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
This article was fact-checked by Rachel Garner and edited by Rebecca Dyer. Although we are proud of our process, we are only human. If you spot an error, please let us know.
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