WHAT we eat can not only affect how well we are in our lives, it can determine how long we live.
In a single year, poor diet played a part in nearly half of all deaths from heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes, according to a new study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The research from Tufts University blamed 10 nutrients for 45.4 per cent or 318,656 cardiometabolic deaths in 2012.
The researchers found that the largest number of diet-related cardiometabolic (CMD) deaths were related to eating too much salt, processed and unprocessed meat and sugary drinks, while not eating enough fruit, vegetables, whole grains, seafood, omega-3 fats and low polyunsaturated fats (found in walnuts, flax and sunflower seeds and fish).
"Dietary factors were estimated to be associated with a substantial proportion of deaths from heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes," the paper's authors said. "These results should help identify priorities, guide public health planning, and inform strategies to alter dietary habits and improve health."
The leading cause of death for those over 45 in Australia is coronary heart disease, with data finding it accounts for one in seven male deaths and one in eight female deaths.
Pinpointing how much what we eat affects our health is notoriously tricky. Not only do people tend to underestimate what they're eating and how much of it, there is also the challenge of isolating the effects of individual nutrients and food compared to the many other factors that affect our health.
Despite this, the findings of the new study "appear correct", wrote professors from JohnHopkinsUniversity in an editorial response to the paper.
"Improving diet quality could help prevent a large fraction of CMD deaths and reduce health disparities," the response authors wrote. "There is some precedence – such as from trials of the Mediterranean diet plus supplemental foods – that modification of diet can reduce cardiovascular disease risk by 30 per cent to 70 per cent."
Dr Bruce Neal of the University of Sydney's George Institute for Global Health says that while the exact numbers from the study should be taken with caution, they are not dissimilar to previous research.
"It highlights once again how big an issue diet is to global ill health," he says, adding that the results are "highly applicable" to Australians.
Less than half of all Australian adults meet the dietary guidelines for the recommended daily consumption of two or more serves of fruit, while 93 per cent do not eat the recommended five serves of vegetables.
He agrees that the research around the protective benefits of the Mediterranean diet is "compelling" and reminds that "small, incremental changes" can make a big difference to our quality of life and health.
"Most things probably sit on a scale between really bad and really good and what we're trying to do, all of the time, is not try to switch people from one end of the scale to the other end because that's not realistic but just try to get people doing, on average, a little bit better more of the time," Neal says.
"Pretty much everyone in Australia is eating a diet that is sub-optimal in terms of its potential healthiness – everyone eats some junk, a bit too much salt, a bit too much fat... that means if you can implement [small changes>[/embedp>
