What a 10-year, 125,000-person study reveals about plant-based diets

Costa Rica Series, Episode 3 · By Dr. Sean Wells, PT

You've heard it a hundred times, maybe even said it to your patients yourself: "Avoid ultra-processed foods." It's become one of the most repeated rules in nutrition, and even on our website material. But a large new study suggests the story is more nuanced, especially when it comes to plant-based eating.

For the third video in our Costa Rica series, we dug into research showing that people who ate a mostly plant-based diet had a lower risk of death and type 2 diabetes, even when some of those foods were ultra-processed. What mattered most wasn't the processing. It was the quality of the food.

PTs: want CEUs on this? See our nutrition series.

The study

Thompson and colleagues published this prospective cohort study in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe in 2026. The researchers followed 124,836 adults from the UK Biobank, aged 40 to 70 at the start, for rough...