Poor diet kills more people worldwide than any other risk factor.
—it’s just a question of how. Nearly every nation fails to get the right balance of nutrients, whether it’s because folks indulge in processed meats and giant sodas or because they lack basic access to nutritious legumes and grains. And according to, these bad diets are responsible for 11 million deaths worldwide. That’s more than any other individual risk factor, including smoking.
The study used dietary data from 195 countries to try to probe which foods or nutrients were responsible for the most deaths. Too much sodium and not enough whole grains turned out to be some of the biggest killers, claiming 3 million lives apiece in 2017, with insufficient fruit following up with 2 million deaths. Combined, those three factors accounted for more than half of all diet-related deaths. But that’s not to say that was true everywhere.
These imbalances in our diets clearly contribute to early deaths, but the study also notes that interventions to change diets haven’t historically been very successful. There’s no evidence as to what tactics work best, or even if they work at all, and the authors point out that much of the effort has gone into changing consumer habits rather than forcing the food industries worldwide to shift.
One thing is clear: nearly every global diet needs to change somehow. Despite the many challenges in studying nutrition,
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