Do you want to live longer? And reduce your risk of death? Then make sure your diet includes carrots, spinach, pumpkin, tomatoes, and other sources of carotenoids. High carotenoid levels reduce your risk of death. Carotenoids specifically protect against fatal forms of cancer.

Study
Epidemiologists from the University of Connecticut analyzed data from 19,168 American adults aged 30 and over who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1986 and 2006.

The researchers knew the concentrations of several important carotenoids in the participants' blood. Based on this information, the epidemiologists divided the participants into three equal-sized groups (tertiles).

The epidemiologists also knew which participants had died, when, and from what cause. In their publication in the British Journal of Nutrition, they calculated the associations between these factors.

Results
During the period when epidemiologists were able to monitor their participants, the risk of death in the tertile with the highest carotenoid concentration was 31 percent lower than in the tertile with the lowest concentration. A high carotenoid intake protected against fatal forms of cancer. This is not entirely surprising.

You can see this in the table below. Click on it for a larger version.

The researchers also looked at potassium and vitamin C. They found no effect of potassium on mortality, but high serum vitamin C reduced the risk of cancer death.

Converted to dietary intake
Because we want to live past the age of one hundred with exceptional vitality, we naturally want to know what we need to do to achieve optimal carotenoid intake. Therefore, we've extracted carotenoid intake data from other NHANES publications and then converted them into tertiles.

For convenience, we've assumed that a high intake in the other NHANES data correlates with a high level in the Connecticut study. This isn't entirely methodologically sound, of course. But if it can't be done the way it should, then it must be done the way it can.

We then calculated how many of a number of commonly consumed foods that provide relatively high amounts of carotenoids you would need to eat per day to reach a top-tier tertile.

For the sake of completeness, we assume you don't consume any other sources of carotenoids. While that's not entirely accurate, the table below does provide some guidance.