Better food choices and choosing to live a healthy lifestyle are two of the choices that most people in this generation are beginning to realize more and more. According to Good News Network, a group of scientist said that they have discovered that with better eating habit and healthy food options about one million American lives were saved.
The team of researchers investigated some people who shifted to a healthier diet for the last 15 years and they found that because of this it prevented about 1.1 million premature deaths. The healthier food choices were also found to reduce the number of people having life threatening diseases. They found that life threatening diseases like type 2 diabetes dropped the number of cases to more than 12 percent, Cardiovascular diseases fell by more or less 8 percent and cancer cases by an average of 1.3 percent. However, one of the biggest changes to diets over the last 14 years was actually the result of federal and local rules about trans fat.
The FDA made sure that they made a clear plan in 1999 to make a tighter rule on the artery clogging fats and soon, each individual US state followed the lead. States like New York City banned them in 2006 and it was outlawed in California restaurant food in 2008. Since that time, restaurants and food companies then started taking out trans fat from their menus and ingredients even before the FDA banned it completely earlier this year.
The government regulations alone accounted for half the improvement in the dietary quality over the course of the study explained by the researchers at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They also added that people drank 36 percent fewer sugary drinks during the study. Dong Wang, the lead author and a doctoral candidate at the Chan School said that the study showed that healthy diets should be made into a public policy. He argues that changes to public food support programs, like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), could significantly improve health and life expectancy in America.
