A recent survey found that the percentage of Americans who have “poor diet quality” has dropped from roughly 49 percent to 37 percent.
According to the study, which was published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, “the proportion of U.S. adults with poor diet quality decreased from 48.8% to 37.4%” between 1999 and 2020.
According to an article from Tufts Now, which bills itself as the university’s “official source for news” on its “about” page, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University and one of the study’s authors, “while we’ve seen some modest improvement in American diets in the last two decades, those improvements are not reaching everyone, and many Americans are eating worse.”
The purpose of the study was to determine whether 51,703 adults met “the targets of the validated American Heart Association (AHA) 2020 continuous diet score (based on lower intake of sugar-sweetened beverages, processed meat, saturated fat, and sodium and higher intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and shellfish, and nuts, seeds, and legumes).” In the study, “poor diet” was defined as “less than 40% adherence to the AHA score.”
“Our new research shows that the nation can’t achieve nutritional and health equity until we address the barriers many Americans face when it comes to accessing and eating nourishing food,” Mozaffarian stated.
A recent study has revealed that women following a Mediterranean diet, which often consists of foods and ingredients like nuts, vegetables, fruits, seafood, and olive oil, had noticeably longer lifespans.
A study released earlier this month found that “In this cohort study of [25,315] women followed up for 25 years, higher adherence to the Mediterranean diet was associated with a 23 percent reduced risk of all-cause mortality,”