Research
Mixed
Improving diet quality over 12 years is associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, but not necessarily cancer mortality, depending on the dietary index used.
Improving your diet quality can reduce your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, especially if you follow patterns like the Alternate Healthy Eating Index or Mediterranean Diet. While the link to cancer mortality is less clear across all dietary patterns, focusing on overall diet quality is still beneficial.
GoodQualifiesMEDIUM confidence
A 20-percentile increase in the Alternate Healthy Eating Index and Alternate Mediterranean Diet scores, but not the DASH score, was associated with a significantly reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease... A significant inverse association between diet quality and the risk of death from cancer was seen only when the DASH score was used
Why this rating
High-quality cohort data, but the findings are nuanced and vary by dietary index and cause of death.
Source
Association of Changes in Diet Quality with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality
Mercedes Sotos‐Prieto et al. · New England Journal of Medicine · 2017
DOI 10.1056/nejmoa1613502
cohort · n=73739Cited 459×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- Improving overall diet quality over a 12-year period significantly reduces the risk of all-cause mortality, with greater improvements yielding larger reductions in risk.Strong
- Maintaining a consistently high-quality diet over 12 years is associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality compared to maintaining a consistently low-quality diet.Strong
Related findings · Mixed
- Bariatric surgery (VSG and RYGB) is the most effective and sustainable treatment for obesity, producing marked and sustained weight loss that non-surgical interventions cannot match.Strong
- Severely protein-deficient diets (2–3% energy) induce lean body mass loss and metabolic imbalance, whereas adequate protein intake (0.66 g/kg/d minimum) is a prerequisite for maintaining muscle, bone, and physiological function.Strong
- For patients with Class III obesity (BMI >39.9 kg/m2), metabolic bariatric surgery (MBS) is significantly more effective than any currently approved medication, with BilioPancreatic Diversion (BPD) showing the highest estimated weight loss.Strong
This is one finding among thousands. Every one is graded and traced to its source, so you can see what the evidence actually supports. Browse the research →