An unhealthy diet is considered a risk factor for numerous diseases and can also increase the risk of premature death. According to a recent study, a third of deaths from cardiovascular disease in the EU are due to poor nutrition.
Researchers from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food (INL) and the nutriCARD competence cluster examined cardiovascular mortality due to nutrition-related risk factors in 54 countries. The results are published in the “European Journal of Preventive Cardiology”.
What role does nutrition play?
Numerous studies have shown that an unhealthy diet can impair health and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. The team now tried to estimate what proportion nutrition actually plays in cardiovascular deaths using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study.
The researchers explain that data on 13 nutrition-related risks and 13 forms of cardiovascular diseases in 54 countries in Western, Eastern and Central Europe as well as Central Asia (European Region of the World Health Organization) were taken into account.
More than 1.5 million deaths
The data analysis showed that suboptimal nutrition led to 1.55 million cardiovascular deaths in emergency rooms in the countries considered in 2019. Overall, according to the researchers, one in six deaths in Europe was due to an unbalanced diet.
In the case of cardiovascular diseases, one in three deaths is caused by an unhealthy diet, according to the first author of the study Theresa Pörschmann, doctoral student at the Chair of Biochemistry and Physiology of Nutrition at the University of Jena.
According to the researchers, in the 27 EU member states taken into account, around 600,000 premature deaths (around 112,000 of them in Central Europe) were due to an unhealthy diet.
Not enough whole grains and legumes
The researchers also determined which nutritional factors had the greatest influence on premature deaths. Accordingly, the negative influencing factors include consuming too few whole grain products and too few legumes as well as a diet with too much salt and too much red meat.
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And “the study does not even take factors such as alcohol consumption and excessive energy intake, which can cause obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus, into account,” explains Prof. Stefan Lorkowski from the Institute of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Jena.
According to the researchers, the number of cardiovascular deaths actually caused by an unbalanced diet is probably significantly higher.
Balanced nutrition for prevention
Overall, the results illustrate the great preventive potential of a balanced diet for heart health, although the researchers believe that there is still a lot of room for improvement in Central Europe, especially since, according to the study results, around 31 percent of cardiovascular deaths in this country were due to an unhealthy diet. (fp)
