70,000 lives a year 'could be saved by a healthier diet'

Daily Mail. January 4, 2008

This was a report by Daniel Martin (political reporter) following a cabinet office study called "Food: An analysis of the issues". The report concluded "there can be few areas of public policy where the positive benefits to lives, health and wellbeing are potentially as dramatic as they could be in diet and nutrition." "The potential benefits of changes to diets are huge, as are the issues to be tackled in effecting and sustaining long-term change." "The current costs of diet related ill health are probably in excess of £10 billion a year and growing."

The article had a summary table on deaths, which the report estimated could be avoided with better diet. I have no idea how the cabinet study came to these numbers, but, if accurate, they do make sobering reading:

- 42,000 premature deaths could be avoided if people ate 5 portions of fruit & veg a day;
- 20,000 lives could be saved if salt intake were reduced to the recommended maximum of 6g per day;
- 3,500 lives could be saved by cutting saturated fat intake by 2.3%;
- 3,500 lives could be saved by cutting sugar intake by 1.8%.

Other sobering stats were:
- There has been a 300% rise in the consumption of ready meals over the past decade;
- 2 billion takeaway meals are bought every year;
- £10 billion is the estimated annual cost to the NHS and public services of poor diet;
- £20 billion would be a further saving if people ate more healthy (not sure how?).

I'm quite sceptical of some of the stats above (on the first set of bullets especially) - I'm not sure how they were reached and, logically, I would expect more benefit from stopping eating bad things than adding in good things. Tkae sugar, for example, could we save 7,000 lives if we cut intake by 3.6%? Does the benefit continue in a straight line? We eat 400 empty calories of sugar, per average person in the UK. Surely we can reduce by far more than 1.8% and what would the benefit be?

Even if UK PLC read this article and thought about eating better, this can only be a good thing.