The ongoing "tightening of the belts" makes its adjustments not only in the purchasing opportunities of Russians, but also in their eating habits. You have to buy not what you want, but what is cheaper, albeit not very useful and of high quality.
However, improper nutrition may not hit the wallet very much, but it will hit the cardiovascular system hard. This was proved by experts at the University of Jena named after Friedrich Schiller, who composed in 2019list of countries with the highest mortality due to malnutrition. Should I be proud that the first ten places went to states that were formerly part of the USSR?
The purpose and methodology of the study
The researchers had the task of emphasizing the relationship between individual risk factors in the diet and cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the WHO European Region.
The experts used a group of indicators called the Global Disease Burden Survey to measure nutritional mortality from cardiovascular disease.
This assessment includes eleven forms of cardiovascular disease, twelve food and nutrient groups and 27 risk-outcome pairs in 51 European countries.
Among the 12 most important dietary factors for the development of problems with the heart and blood vessels included:
- low fiber diet;
- lack of fruit;
- lack of legumes;
- lack of nuts and seeds;
- lack of polyunsaturated fatty acids;
- lack of omega-3 fatty acids from seafood;
- lack of vegetables;
- lack of whole grains;
- a diet high in processed meat;
- high sodium content;
- the use of sweetened drinks - one of the most harmful in the world;
- eating foods with trans fatty acids.
Consumption data was collected from several sources, including nutrition studies in European countries, household budget surveys, and UN Food and Agriculture Organization balance sheets and food invoices. In addition, for sodium and trans fatty acids, we used data on the norms of the daily content of sodium in the urine and the presence of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in packaged products, respectively. All dietary data (except sodium and sweetened drinks) were standardized to 2000 kcal / day.
For the time period of the study were taken 1990-2016.
Complete malnutrition mortality rating
Research results
The countries of the former Soviet Union are leading in mortality from pathologies of the heart and blood vessels associated with malnutrition. And the leader in sad statistics is Uzbekistan (394 deaths per 100,000 people).
- The countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia invariably have the highest mortality rates (average values are 304 and 289 people per one hundred thousand of the population, respectively). With the exception of Turkey, which has a “dietary” mortality rate of 67 per 100,000.
- In Central Europe (the average is 177 deaths per hundred thousand inhabitants), the indicators ranged from 86 deaths per 100,000 population in Slovenia to 260 deaths per 100,000 population in Bulgaria.
- In Western Europe (the average is 64 per 100,000 people), the highest rate was found in Greece (100 deaths per 100,000 people), and the lowest - in Spain and Israel (in each state, 43 cases per 100,000 people).
- In the post-Soviet space, the best things with proper nutrition are in Russia. In our country, so far the lowest mortality rate from heart and blood vessel diseases caused by diet errors. He is 291 dead per 100 thousand people.
How is balanced nutrition and CVD related?
In 2016, dietary risks were associated with 2.1 million deaths from cardiovascular disease in the WHO European Region. And here is how dietary risks affected it:
- Lack of whole grains led to approximately 429,000 deaths.
- The second most dangerous is the lack of nuts and seeds in the diet - 341,000 deaths.
- The third most dangerous is the lack of fruit - 262,000 deaths.
- A diet high in sodium is not good for the body - 251,000 deaths.
- And in fifth place in terms of danger was a shortage of omega-3 fatty acids in the diet - 227,000 deaths.
Thus, by balancing the daily menus of Europeans, theoretically, you can avoid about one out of every five premature deaths.
As usual, the authors of the study have two news for readers - good and bad.
Good news: age-standardized mortality rates have declined over the past 26 years.
Bad news: the absolute number of deaths associated with an improper diet from cardiovascular diseases increased from 25 to 600 in the period from 2010 to 2016 in Western Europe and by 4,300 deaths in Central Asia.
For specific cardiovascular diseases, 1.76 million deaths (84% of the total) associated with dietary errors were caused by coronary heart disease. It is followed by ischemic stroke (175,202 deaths or 8.3% of the total) and hemorrhagic stroke (132,749 deaths or 6.3%).
In 2016, approximately 601,000 deaths (28.6% of all nutrition-related deaths from CVD) occurred among adults under 70 years of age. In simple terms: eat healthy food - you can live longer.