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

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.

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.