The World's Leading Cause of Death? A Bad Diet (nbc12.com)

An anonymous reader writes: "A bad diet kills more people globally than tobacco," reports Bloomberg, citing a new study funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published Wednesday in Lancet. The study argues that poor diets led to 11 million deaths in 2017 -- and that more than half of them were caused by just three main dietary factors: low consumption of whole grains, low consumption of fruits, and high intake of sodium.

In fact, bad diets are responsible for more deaths worldwide than any other cause, the researchers concluded. "We found that improvement of diet could potentially prevent one in every five deaths globally."

Comments

correlation

[religionofpeas]

It's just a correlation, and on top of that, the numbers are distorted by amount of medical care.

I really doubt that high sodium is the biggest killer, for example.

Re:correlation

[Aighearach]

The longest lifespans are in Japan.

The highest sodium consumption is in Japan.

In many other countries, the source of high consumption of sodium is processed foods.

Consumption of large percentages of diet from processed foods is understood to reduce lifespan.

I don't know why it isn't more obvious to people that sodium is a confounding variable, not a causal one.

Seems questionable ....

[King_TJ]

I mean -- even if I happily accept that a poor diet is the leading cause of premature death? They claim that low consumption of fruits is one of the major problems. One of the first things I hear from dieticians trying to solve obesity problems is to curb one's intake of fruit juices, because they contain so much natural sugar and calories.

I'm sure the fruits themselves are better for you than drinking fruit juice ... but even so? What part of a balanced diet is so contingent on eating fruit? It seems to me you could get most of the same vitamin and mineral benefits from a good selection of vegetables - not to mention all the "vitamin fortified" products out there like our cereals.

Re:Wrong. Sugar is bad, mkay?

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's the proper diet
Bullshit. There's all kinds of conflicting data. Nobody knows what's best. Yes, industry perverted the food pyramid, etc. We know some things are terrible, like megadosing fructose. But meat isn't all roses. Red meat is shown to increase cancer risk... do some research on Neu5Gc. Funny how if we evolved to eat red meat, but we don't have Neu5Gc like most other animals, so have inflammatory responses to it.

The Mediterranean diet has been shown to be very healthy,,, and it's largely plant-based, looking nothing like what you describe above. .... it's ok though, go back to beating your chest about being a proud meat eater, indifferent to the environmental degradation and animal suffering it causes, and enjoy the colon cancer.

Re:Wrong. Sugar is bad, mkay?

[rtb61]

Let's cut to the chase, it is not about what they are eating, it is about what they are not eating. The problem is cheap, crappy junk food, of low nutritional value but loaded up with addictive additives, with total disinterest in health outcomes, profits first. Remember kiddies according to US corporations and the US government, ketchup is a vegetable.

The worlds leading cause of early death, not food, Junk Food Corporations are the world leading cause of early death, through greed driven indifference.