Tag "The Lancet"
The way we eat is killing us – and the planet
This week comes the next instalment from another special Lancet commission which finds that pandemics of obesity and malnutrition are interacting with climate change in a feedback loop and represent an existential threat to humans and the planet.
Cue grim food wheels with only a quarter of a rasher of bacon or a fifth of an egg a day.
Diet-related diseases now cause roughly 11 million deaths a year as preventable cancers, heart disease and strokes, obesity and diabetes have spread along with our way of eating.
In other words, something has gone horribly wrong and we don’t have much time to fix it.
The so-called “reference diet”, published in the first Lancet report,, has caused uproar in some quarters.
The reference diet models each person globally having 14g of red meat a day, 29g of chicken, a fraction of an egg, 250g of dairy, a little fat or oil, very little sugar, and lots of grains and lentils, vegetables and nuts.
People don’t shop and eat by numbers and fractions.
The equivalent of $500bn in agricultural subsidies goes each year to the wrong sort of food – corn, soya, meat and dairy, as cheap raw materials for intensive livestock production and for highly processed foods.
Should we stop eating meat?
If it all sounds too gloomy, it’s worth remembering that the modern western diet is a recent invention.
Air Pollution Increases Diabetes Risk at Levels EPA Calls ‘Safe,’ Study Finds
A major study published Friday in The Lancet Planetary Health has confirmed a reported link between air pollution and diabetes in a big way, finding that particulate matter exposure can increase risk for the disease even at levels currently deemed safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the World Health Organization, CNN reported.
Evidence shows that current levels are still not sufficiently safe and need to be tightened,” study lead author and Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis assistant professor Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly said in a Washington University press release.
The study found that air pollution caused 3.2 million new diabetes cases globally in 2016, 14 percent of the year’s total cases, and causes 150,000 new cases in the U.S. every year. “This is a very well-done report, very believable, and fits well with this emerging knowledge about the impacts of air pollution on a series of chronic diseases,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan to CNN. “I think you can very directly link relaxation of air pollution control standards with increased sickness and death.”
Health experts believe pollution triggers diabetes by reducing insulin production and increasing inflammation, making it harder for the body to turn glucose into energy.
They then looked at previous air pollution studies to develop a model for risk at different pollution levels and used Global Burden of Disease data to determine yearly diabetes cases and years of life lost.
One key finding was that diabetes risk increases at particulate matter levels of 2.4 micrograms per cubic meter of air, while the current EPA safe limit is 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air.
That number rose to 24 percent among veterans exposed to 11.9 to 13.6 micrograms, an increase of 5,000 to 6,000 new diabetes cases per 100,000 people per year.
8 Ways to Reduce Your Exposure to Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals https://t.co/2aeD4FzGmZ @WomenHealthMag @goodhealth @naturallysavvy — EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) 1516413005.0
