Mixed
Higher national income is associated with better adherence to healthy dietary patterns but significantly worse adherence to unhealthy dietary patterns, creating a divergence in diet quality metrics.
If you live in a high-income country, you likely have better access to healthy foods but are also exposed to aggressive marketing of unhealthy options. To improve your diet, you must actively reduce unhealthy items (sugar, sodium, processed meats) even if your healthy item consumption is already good.
Compared with low-income nations, high-income nations had better diets based on healthy items (+2·5 points, 95% UI 0·3 to 4·1), but substantially poorer diets based on unhealthy items (–33·0, –37·8 to –28·3).
Why this rating
Based on hierarchical linear regression across 187 countries with robust statistical uncertainty quantification.
Source
Dietary quality among men and women in 187 countries in 1990 and 2010: a systematic assessment
Fumiaki Imamura et al. · The Lancet Global Health · 2015
DOI 10.1016/s2214-109x(14)70381-x
More from this paper
- Global dietary patterns based on the consumption of healthy items (fruits, vegetables, whole grains, etc.) improved modestly between 1990 and 2010, whereas patterns based on the consumption of unhealthy items (sugar-sweetened beverages, processed meats, sodium, etc.) worsened significantly.Good
- Middle-income nations experienced the largest deterioration in dietary patterns based on unhealthy items between 1990 and 2010, despite showing the largest improvement in healthy dietary patterns.Good
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