Top Health Threats from Food and Diet

Improve Diet

Comprehensive analyses of a region's food and dietary trends, together with their respective effects on human health, can help maximize the public health effects of government campaigns and research programs, a report published by the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) says.
For example, "much greater health gains are to be made through encouraging a healthy diet than through improving food safety,' the report's authors conclude after extensive research into the effects of current food trends in The Netherlands.
Also, after reviewing the full spectrum of dietary habits and potential government measures, they state that "substantial health gains can be made through dietary interventions which are considered feasible."
Of all dietary factors insufficient consumption of fish, fruit and vegetables currently causes the most cases of serious illness and death in The Netherlands. About 50 percent of those can be avoided through interventions which appear feasible from small-scale experiments. In particular, attempts at reducing saturated and trans fatty acid uptake and increasing fish, fruit and vegetables consumption could save many lives, the authors say.
Leading document
"This report will be a leading document in Europe and probably beyond when it comes to making risk-benefit analyses of our food and diets," said Herman Ko� '� � ter, Acting Executive Director of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and chair of the organisation's Advisory Forum. "Research like this again clearly demonstrates high-quality science can lay the groundwork for informed food policy making," he added. Ko� '� � ter was presented with a copy of the report at the Advisory Forum meeting on 19 May 2006 in Vienna (Austria).
The report "Our Food, Our Health: Healthy diet and safe food in The Netherlands" was originally published in Dutch and is largely based on research by RIVM. Data from long-term studies into popular food habits, together with health risk assessments derived from epidemiological research, were fed into the institute's Chronic Diseases Model to predict the impact of trends and interventions on public health.
The research produced a comprehensive overview of our food's health effects, enabling policy makers with clear choices on the importance of various issues. Among the report's main conclusions:

• Unhealthy diet composition currently reduces the average life expectancy of Dutch 40-year-olds by 1.2 years, while obesity claims 0.8 years.

• Taking into account not just deaths but also years spent living with serious disability, unhealthy dietary habits together cause as much health loss as does smoking.

• Current positive trends are the decreasing intake of trans and saturated fatty acids and the increasing consumption of fish.

• Current negative trends are the ever decreasing intakes of fruit, vegetables and dietary fibre, already below recommended levels for 75 percent of the population.

• Each year in The Netherlands, inadequate diet composition causes about 13,000 deaths due to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Obesity claims 7,000 lives due to cardiovascular disease and cancer. By comparison, foodborne infections claim somewhere between 20 and 200 lives each year.

• About 25 percent of deaths and serious illness caused by overweight and obesity would be avoided if all adults would shed three kilograms of their body weight.