The health burden of poor diet in Britain

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

According to a study, the UK's dietary habits cost three times as much as smoking.
We already know that poor eating habits can lead to a range of diseases, such as diabetes and heart problems. Now researchers at the University of Oxford have analyzed data from the World Health Organization to see how much poor diet costs the British people in health terms.

They used disability adjusted life years (DALYs), which is a standard way of measuring the impact of a health problem and found that 37 per cent of DALYs were attributable to disorders where food has an impact - namely, heart disease, diabetes and cancer. They went on and calculated the cost of poor diet in this context and find it is around six billion pounds. This is three times more than smoking costs the health service and double the cost of road traffic accidents. Improving diet should, therefore, be a national public health priority in Britain.

Source
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health November 2005

Please take a moment to give us your comments. For questions about Health matters you may check our "Questions & Answers" Portal and Service.