Unhealthy Diet Reduces Life Expectancy

Dutch public health agency says, as smoking, eating poor diets like too little fish, fruit and vegetables puts human health into trouble.

Insufficient consumption of fish, fruit and vegetables leads to most serious illness and death – A study by European Food Safety Authority, Netherland says.

Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), reported that unhealthy dietary habits causes health loss as equal to smoking apart from deaths.

When obesity reduces 0.8 years of life expectancy, unhealthy dietary habits reduces 1.2 years of the average life expectancy for a 40-year-old Dutch person. These results were obtained from many Dutch studies on public health and food habits that covered some 75 percent of the Netherlands' (16 million people), who ate fruits and vegetables below the recommended level.

In Netherlands, every year about 13,000 deaths due to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer occurs as a result of poor diets. In the other hand obesity claims 7,000 lives by causing heart disease and cancer – a study finds.

So, all the governments through out the world must take efforts to induce healthy and nutritious eating practices among the population - RIVM researchers recommends.

The Dutch researchers also say that increased intake of fish, fruit and vegetables, a reduced saturated and trans fatty acid uptake and a drop of 3 kg in obese people reduces about 25 percent of deaths and serious illness.

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Raised blood cholesterol levels and thus risk of cardiac diseases may result from a higher intake of saturated and trans fatty acids, the sources are animal fats, tropical oils such as coconut and palm oils as wells as processed vegetable oils.

When preparing risk analysis of food and diets, this report seems to be the leading in Europe - Herman Koeter, the head of the European Food Safety Authority says.

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