Poor Diet Is The Greatest Risk To Worldwide Health, Report Says

Diet-related disease is not just an American problem. 
Across the globe, poor diets now pose a greater collective health risk than unsafe sex, alcohol, drugs and tobacco use combined, according to a new report by the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition.
“This snuck up on us,” report co-author Patrick Webb, a nutrition professor at Tufts University and policy and evidence advisor to the panel, told The Huffington Post. “The key point is that poor quality of diets is now the single biggest contributor to the global burden of non-communicable disease.”
Members of the Global Panel, an independent group of food and nutrition researchers funded by the U.K. government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are worried that poorer, developing countries around the world will see a spike in diet-related diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes. And this makes sense: Obesity rates are climbing in all 190 countries, and research shows obesity increases the risk of all these diseases.
Non-communicable diseases can be influenced or acquired by individual behavior, and, Webb argues, due to the choices people make. The report shows that even people who can otherwise access and eat healthy food are choosing food detrimental to their own health. 
“If current trends continue,” the researchers wrote, “the combined number of overweight and obese individuals will increase from 1.33 bil...

Source: Science - The Huffington Post - October 20, 2016 Category: Science Source Type: news