It’s no secret that there are a lot of people who don’t necessarily have the healthiest diets, and while we all know that’s not good, not many people are doing anything to change things. Well, maybe this new statistic will knock some sense into folks.
A new study published in the journal “Lancet” reveals that one in five deaths worldwide can be blamed on poor diet, which translates to 11 million deaths a year. Not scary enough? Well, that statistic is higher than deaths attributed to tobacco and high blood pressure.
Overall, the study, which looked at food consumption trends in 195 countries from 1990 to 2017, found that of the 11 million deaths in 2017, 10 million were from heart disease, 913,000 were the result of obesity-related cancers and 339,000 were from type-2 diabetes. What’s more, more than half of all diet-related deaths around the world could be blamed on diets high in sodium, and low in whole grains and fruit.
As for which countries have the best diets, Israel has the lowest amount of deaths due to poor diets, while Uzbekistan has the highest. As for the U.S., it landed at 43 out of 195. But it isn’t necessarily that all these deaths due to poor diet are because we’re stuffing our faces with fatty and sugary foods. In fact, the study found that more deaths were the result of not eating enough healthy foods, rather than eating too many unhealthy ones.
Source:CBS News