Amidst various headlines featuring the adverse health results of the American diet comes a hint of good news: a new research suggests that developments in U.S. eating habits have obviated more than a million premature deaths in a 14-year duration.
However, as stated in the research, published in the journal Health Affairs, the entire American diet is still poor and there is still much-needed progress to be made.
Experts from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health examined the changes in dietary condition from 1999 to 2012 among a sample of almost 34,000 U.S. adults. They rated healthy eating on a scale of 0 (poor diet) to 110 (perfect diet) and adopted the information from two other long-running researches to deduce the effect that eating habits had on illness and untimely death.
The outcomes presented that dietary progress increasingly prevented 1.1 million premature deaths and emanated in 12.6 percent fewer problems of type 2 diabetes, 8.6 percent fewer conditions of cardiovascular disease and 1.3 percent fewer cancer cases over the past 14 years.
Although this is absolutely good news, the experts say that we're by no means in the clear yet.
Lead study author Dong Wang, a doctoral candidate in the Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology at Harvard Chan School, told CBS News that while the kind of the U.S. diet improved reasonably from 39.9 to 48.2 [on a scale of 0 to 110] from 1999 through 2012, but, the dietary quality of the U.S. populace remains far from excellence. There are still large rooms for further improvements, he added.
The greatest development was noticed in decreasing trans-fat intake -- compelled extremely by regulatory actions, such as the FDA's current injunction on its use -- which added about half of the progress in the entire dietary quality. The authors also recorded an approximately 36 percent reduction in sugar-sweetened beverages and juice.
Moreover, Americans are eating more fruits, nuts and legumes, whole grains and polyunsaturated fatty acids -- healthy fats like those found in some vegetable oils or fish -- and reducing consumption of red and processed meat, though those developments are minimal.
And regardless of the nutrition education efforts contrived by the dietary guidelines and recommendations, sodium intake has been expanding over the last 14 years.
The findings also showed important gaps in healthy eating tendencies across socio-economic groups. The development in dietary was bigger among persons with higher socioeconomic status and a healthier body weight. Meanwhile, African Americans had the lowest dietary condition, which was regarded for by lower incomes and literacy. The study authors also noted that these gaps in dietary quality go on or even extended from 1999 to 2012.
Generally, Wang said that while much work still requires to be done, the outcomes of the study are promising. He added that the most essential conclusion is that even small progress in dietary quality can lead to important reduction in disease risk and disease burden.
