What You're Not Eating Is Killing You
Which is just a dramatic way of saying that you could live longer if you ate more healthy foods.
Kale, anyone?
Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP, via Getty Images
After years of issuing dire warnings that certain foods are killing us, nutrition researchers managed to capture lots of attention last week by proclaiming that lack of certain foods was also killing us. The paper making this claim, published in the medical journal the Lancet, examined eating habits around the world, and noted a mismatch between what people actually eat and what various studies suggest we should eat.
Framing things in terms of deaths, or killing, is what garnered all the attention, but this is an advance in the marketing of science more than of science itself. It’s long been known that regions where people consume lots of fruits and vegetables have good health and relatively long life expectancies. But that doesn’t get as much mileage on Twitter as a statement about lack of vegetables actually killing people.