Poor Diet Is a Factor In One In Five Deaths, Global Disease Study Reveals (theguardian.com) 110
schwit1 shares a report from The Guardian: Millions of people are eating the wrong sorts of food for good health. Eating a diet that is low in whole grains, fruit, nuts and seeds and fish oils and high in salt raises the risk of an early death, according to the huge and ongoing study Global Burden of Disease. The study, based at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, compiles data from every country in the world and makes informed estimates where there are gaps. Five papers on life expectancy and the causes and risk factors of death and ill health have been published by the Lancet medical journal. Diet is the second highest risk factor for early death after smoking. Other high risks are high blood glucose which can lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, high body mass index (BMI) which is a measure of obesity, and high total cholesterol. All of these can be related to eating the wrong foods, although there are also other causes.
no shit (Score:2)
did it really take a study and five papers to tell us that eating garbage food is bad for us?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Bread, chips, french fries, cakes, pies
Lattes, milkshakes, and smoothies
Carbs are the devil"
Unfortunately, higher atmospheric CO2 due to climate change, cause also the good crops to have more carbs and less nutrients.
http://news.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
Re: (Score:3)
> Now compare what a healthy diet costs ( especially feeding a family ) vs the non-healthy variety and you -might- get a clue as to why folks choose to eat what they do.
You mean healthy staples versus processed junk?
Your media narrative is UTTER HOGWASH intended to soothe your inner conspicuous consumer and enable bad habits. Real food is not more expensive.
It actually costs LESS money. What it costs more of is time and effort.
Pretty much ANY thing you are willing to make yourself is going to be cheaper
Why keep encouraging third world reproduction? (Score:1)
The real question should be, why do Western nations keep encouraging and supporting third world reproduction, especially in regions where there aren't enough resources to support even a small fraction of the current population?
Look at what's happening in Nigeria [wikipedia.org]:
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Third world reproductive rates collapse the moment you give them a pension and educate the women and provide access to contraception. Oh and have a word with religions which use weight of population to defeat other religions.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
did it really take a study and five papers to tell us that eating garbage food is bad for us?
No, but the study doesn't tell us that bad diet is bad; it quantifies how bad it is and ranks it against other risk factors.
Re: (Score:2)
Posting to undo an accidental bad mod.
Re: (Score:2)
> No, but the study doesn't tell us that bad diet is bad; it quantifies how bad it is and ranks it against other risk factors.
It's still pretty much useless information.
It's like peddling global warming armageddon in order to discourage wasteful expensive over consumption or shitting where you live. You shouldn't really need a hysterical adrenaline overload media narrative to prompt you to clean up after yourself when your Earth Day celebration is over.
Re: (Score:2)
I learned the opposite from this. Apparently I can enjoy a diet of all sweets and there's an 80% chance it won't even be a contributing factory to my death, let alone a direct cause. Sounds more like a 90%+ chance that it won't make a real difference to my longevity. That's damned good odds.
Re: (Score:2)
Like everything else, it's all a matter of degree. Everything in moderation while avoiding any strange fads or extremes.
It's almost something like I learned in school before the "Food Pyramid" was around. ;-ppppp
Re: (Score:2)
I think it would be safe to say that ANY diet is a factor in 100% of deaths. Face it, no matter what you eat or in what quantities, you're going to die. In this case, eat garbage and you'll just have problems sooner. Which means that really, all diet really affects is quality of life and time (until your inevitable death...).
Re: (Score:2)
What good? They simply won't exist anymore.
Affect on medical bills (Score:1)
If folks want to eat, drink & smoke unhealthy stuff that cuts short their life well it is not exactly a secret about the affects so live how ya like , fine by me. However, if this unhealthy behavior requires extra public funding and burdens unnecessarily health costs by requiring higher premiums from folks with healthy eating, moderate/ no drinking as well as no smoking then they can form their own insurance pools and participate as they like.
Public sharing of insurance for largely uncontrollable fact
Woo! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Minimizing the intake heavily processed food is a good step forward into a better health. A lot of processed food contains added sugar and too much salt to be healthy. This doesn't exclude the consumption of a nice beef and some potatoes with it, just keep the processing of the potatoes down so that they are still in chewable chunks, not mashed or french fries type.
Add to it that when heavily processed food adds salt then it lacks iodine, which is essential to burn the energy.
Then throw in a commute by bicy
Re: (Score:3)
[chuckle] If you still think we grammar nazis don't have a point, please take note of the example above. It means the opposite of what the poster meant to write.
yes, it *is* about you (Score:1)
If you're one of the pizza-seven-days-a-week crowd, this story is aimed directly at you. Yet will any of you read it? Much less act on it?
I'm always amazed at how people will trade away their health for junk food.
Re: (Score:2)
I will just plug vegetables here. The average Westerner eats between 10 and 20 grams of dietary fiber a day. Most heath authorities have revised up the minimum healthy intake from around 20 to 30+ grams a day as a result of research into the human microbiome. Basically your lower bowel is being starved of the material that feeds the bugs and which make the short chain fatty acids that feed the bowel walls. This is a bad move as the disbiosis and damaged bowel wall is now being associated with just about eve
Nature is confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
365.242 for a solar year, but 365.25 for calendar years including leap years.
The GP is being pedantic, but I used it to take your post as a bit of hyperbole - 8 days a week if you will!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Wrong. The 365.25 year is an approximation of the 365.2422 solar year, which reveals why the calendar year (most-times) uses a sequence of 365, 365, 365, 366 days. When counting a daily/weekly event over long periods of time, it is necessary to adjust for the leap-year days which occur: A value of 365.25, is a simple adjustment to the calculation. With the arrival of pocket computing devices, it is possible to calculate the exact number of days elapsing between 2 events (eg. delta-days operation); no ap
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Eating to death vs starving to death.
If only there was some middle ground. .... Oh well. Here's to heart disease!
Easy to correct behavior. (Score:2, Interesting)
All you have to do is make clear that it will cost more to eat foods with poor nutrition. Right now we are subsidizing corn and thus high-fructose corn syrup, so it's put into everything. The problem is that cost of healthcare is decoupled from things that impair your health. A simple behavioral correction would be to provide universal health care and add a health care tax (must show on receipt) to things that are statistically correlated with health care costs.
What this means is that if there is an X% c
Re: (Score:2)
What this means is that if there is an X% chance of getting cancer after smoking Y cigarettes, you can take the average cost to treat lung cancer, divide it up and tack that cost onto the price of cigarettes.
THIS! I have always said they need to figure out the annual cost to the healthcare system of cancers caused by cigarettes and then levy that amount of tax against cigarette companies every year to offset the cost. That way smokers pay for smoker deaths, rather than the rest of the population subsidizing it. It would mean lower healthcare costs for people who live cleaner lives and higher for those who don't.
Re: (Score:2)
Well apparently such a system offends the sensibilities of multiple mods.
I once did a gig (Score:2)
obesity also tied to poor diet (Score:2, Interesting)
I grew up in the 1950's and 1960's. (Lawn, etc). There were very few obese people. All though pre-university schooling I remember only one kid who was overweight. Adults were also thin, and that formed my mental image of what a normal sized person is. You did not see "mobility scooters" for weight- only wheelchairs for disabilities such as paraplegics.
Tody, I am still "normal" size (in my 60's), and the world has ballooned around me. I see obese children, even young ones 5-6 years old. Most adults l
Re: (Score:1)
I've often wondered about that. Watching movies from the '50s through the '70s, people seemed tiny. NASA footage showing what appears to be middle-aged men with 28 inch waists.
Re: (Score:2)
https://stateofobesity.org/ima... [stateofobesity.org]
High BMI is a Red Herring (Score:4, Insightful)
"high body mass index (BMI)"
High BMI is a red herring. BMI is based on a sedentary lifestyle like office workers have. Those of us who are in physically demanding jobs very often have high BMIs without being obese because we have more muscle, denser bones and lower body fat levels. My son and I farm and do butchery. we have very high BMIs but it is muscle that is necessary for our work. Same goes for athletes who tend to score high on the BMI but again it is muscle, not fat. The BMI system needs to be redone to account for the fact that not everyone is a sedentary office worker. Our life insurance company takes this into account - they do a measure of hips, belly and chest which corrects for the errors on BMI.
Re: (Score:1)
BMI is extremely reliable for over 90% of the population.
Before rationalizing your "high muscular development" as an excuse for a high BMI, check your Waist-to-hip ratio (WHR).
You might also peek in a mirror without holding your breath.
If you see a muffin top or some Dunlap's disease, then you are a fatty.
Maybe it's not your bones that are dense. Have some more chips and wash them down with another beer. You only live once.
Re: (Score:2)
"BMI is extremely reliable for over 90% of the population."
That is a very sad statistic since BMI is such an unreliable indicator for people who are active. What that mean is that 90% of the population is sedentary. Very sad.
"Before rationalizing your "high muscular development" as an excuse for a high BMI, check your Waist-to-hip ratio (WHR)."
So you apparently didn't actually read my comment but instead you just reacted with your own little inner voice. How troll like. Go back and read what I wrote.
"You mi
Re: (Score:2)
That's all good and fine, but you and your son are generally outliers. People like you who are fit, active, and muscly aren't the ones who are even looking to government messages about BMI or getting active, or losing weight.
Health messages are targeted at the unhealthy. For those people BMI is far from a red herring.
Our life insurance company takes this into account
That's because they aren't targeting messages at people who are fat, unhealthy and need to move their fat arses more. They are in the business of accurate predictions which involve health analy
Re:High BMI is a Red Herring (Score:4, Informative)
High BMI is a red herring
No, it's an indicator. It's a means to determining if there is a need for further investigation of health problems. People with a high or low BMI will likely need an additional check for body fat. There are a number of means to double check this, buoyancy, skin pinch, waist to hip ratio, likely more.
I don't believe that BMI needs to be redone, just that it needs to be taken with the knowledge that it is an incomplete indicator of health. As you stated for your life insurance the BMI was taken along with waist, hip, and chest measurements. That's likely to cover all but the rarest of cases as an indicator of health.
I believe the BMI has been a victim of it's own success. It works well so often to indicate that a person is over or under healthy weight that people have put more faith in it than it deserves. I guess that it's pretty rare for people to have a "bad" BMI and good health, neglecting other indicators of good health. Just like it is possible but rare for people to have a "good" BMI and poor health, neglecting other indicators of poor health.
From what I understand the combination of BMI with waist to hip ratios covers probably an additional 9% on top of the 90% that BMI alone does not cover. The last 1% will just have to get a note from a physician on their health and life insurance policies.
Top three Slashdot diets to kill you... (Score:2)
Over the years, I've gotten plenty of diet advice on Slashdot that would kill me sooner rather than later. Here are the top three diets.
Re: (Score:2)
They couldn't be any worse, you're already incredibly fat and out of shape.
Funny. I just got back from doing cable rows at the gym. Time to make my two-egg, tofu omelette.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And, unless you're an utter moron, it was *sarcasm.*
After you changed your story from one Snickers to two Snickers and I proved how unhealthy your diet recommendation was.
But, you know, you're a fucking idiot, so you simply made up shit to suit your own narrative about why you stay so goddamned fat.
I might have to buy new pants next month because the new pants I got last month are already TOO BIG. And the new pair of pants that I three months ago are TOO FUCKING BIG. Who knew that losing weight was such a nuisance?
Re: (Score:2)
> No one here on Slashdot wants to harm you.
Some of you most certainly do. You have a variety of bad ideas that you haven't thought through or you really have no clue about. You want to subject those ideas to the rest of us.
Grapes Of Wrath (movie scene) (Score:2)
"he said they had fried chicken for supper, I peeked in the tent whilst they were eating and they had fried dough just like everybody else"
Eat crap for the economic benefit of society (Score:1)
New Obesity Drugs (Score:1)
So... (Score:2)
... if everyone ate better, 20% of the population wouldn't die? o_O