Health effects of dietary risks in 195 countries — Global Burden of Disease 2017
In plain English
The diet-specific arm of the Global Burden of Disease project quantified how 15 individual foods and nutrients drive death and disability across 195 countries. In 2017, suboptimal diet was linked to 11 million deaths a year — but the surprise was which foods mattered most: too little whole grains, fruit and nuts, and too much sodium, drove far more deaths than the red and processed meat that dominates headlines. Cardiovascular disease was the leading diet-related killer, ahead of cancer and type 2 diabetes.
Why it matters
Poor diet was linked to 11M deaths a year — driven more by too few whole grains, fruits and nuts than by too much red meat.
Informs: Life Expectancy
Provenance
- Design
- Systematic review
- Sample size (n)
- 195,000,000
- Peer-reviewed
- Yes
- Replications
- 3
- Funding
- Mixed (public + private/non-profit)
- Funders
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- Institutions
- Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington
decades.plus score
A transparent 0–100 weighted sum across six components. Higher scores reflect bigger, cleaner, more replicated work.
Caveats
A modelled comparative-risk estimate, not a trial; it assumes the underlying intake–risk associations are causal. Dietary intake data are sparse in many low-income countries, which widens the uncertainty around national figures.
