Why More Nigerians May Die Of Diet-Related Diseases

Nigeria ranks 42nd out of 195 countries with the highest rate of diet-related deaths, with low intake of whole grains being the leading dietary risk factor for mortality and disease in Nigeria, United States (US), India, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt, Germany, Iran, and Turkey.

A study published in The Lancet yesterday by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) estimates that one in five deaths globally – equivalent to 11 million deaths – are associated with poor diet, and that diet contributes to a range of chronic diseases in people around the world.

The study tracked trends in the consumption of 15 dietary factors from 1990 to 2017 in 195 countries.

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study describes itself as “the single largest and most detailed scientific effort ever conducted to quantify levels and trends in health. Led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, it is truly a global effort, with over 3,600 researchers from more than 145 countries participating in the most recent update.”

According to the study, diets high in sodium, low in whole grains and low in fruits accounted for more than half of all diet-related deaths globally in 2017.

The authors said the causes of these deaths included 10 million deaths from cardiovascular disease; 913,000 cancer deaths; and almost 339,000 deaths from Type 2 diabetes. They disclosed that deaths related to diet swelled from eight million in 1990, largely due to increase in population and population ageing.

They noted that in 2017, more deaths were caused by diets with too low amounts of foods such as whole grains, fruits, nuts and seeds than by diets with high levels of trans fats, sugary drinks, and high levels of red and processed meats.

The researchers said the findings highlight the urgent need for coordinated global efforts to improve diet through collaboration with various sections of the food system and policies that drive balanced diets.

According to the study, “in 2017, there was a 10-fold difference between the country with the highest rate of diet-related deaths (Uzbekistan) and the country with the lowest (Israel).

The countries with the lowest rates of diet-related deaths were Israel (89 deaths per 100,000 people), France, Spain, Japan, and Andorra.

The United Kingdom (UK) ranked 23rd (127 deaths per 100,000) above Ireland (24th) and Sweden (25th), and the United States ranked 43rd (171 deaths per 100,000) after Rwanda and Nigeria (41st and 42nd), China ranked 140th (350 deaths per 100,000 people), and India 118th (310 deaths per 100,000 people).

The countries with the highest rates of diet-related deaths were Uzbekistan (892 deaths per 100,000 people), Afghanistan, Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu.”

The authors said, regionally, high sodium intake (above 3g per day) was the leading dietary risk for death and disease in China, Japan, and Thailand. “Low intake of whole grains (below 125g per day) was the leading dietary risk factor for death and disease in the USA, India, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Russia, Egypt, Germany, Iran, and Turkey.

In Bangladesh, low intake of fruits (below 250g per day) was the leading dietary risk. And in Mexico, low intake of nuts and seeds (below 21g per day) ranked first.

High consumption of red meat (above 23g per day), processed meat (above 2g per day), trans fat (above 0.5 per cent total daily energy), and sugar-sweetened beverages (above 3g per day) were towards the bottom in ranking of dietary risks for death and disease for highly populated countries,” they noted.

The study evaluated the consumption of major foods and nutrients across 195 countries and quantified the impact of poor diets on death and disease from non-communicable diseases (specifically cancers, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes). It tracked trends between 1990 and 2017.

Previously, population level assessment of the health effects of suboptimal diet has not been possible because of the complexities of characterising dietary consumption across different nations.

The new study combines and analyses data from epidemiological studies – in the absence of long-term randomised trials, which are not always feasible in nutrition – to identify associations between dietary factors and non-communicable diseases.

The study looked at 15 dietary elements – diets low in fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds, milk, fibre, calcium, seafood omega-3 fatty acids, polyunsaturated fats, and diets high in red meat, processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, trans fatty acids, and sodium.

The authors noted that there were varying levels of data available for each dietary factor, which increases the statistical uncertainty of these estimates. For example, while data on how many people ate most dietary factors was available for almost all countries (95 per cent), data for the sodium estimates was only available for around one in four countries.

The researchers said the magnitude of diet-related disease highlights that many existing campaigns have not been effective and called for new food system interventions to rebalance diets around the world.

Importantly, they noted that changes must be sensitive to the environmental effects of the global food system, to avoid adverse effects on climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, depletion of freshwater, and soil degradation.

In January 2019, The Lancet published the EAT-Lancet Commission, which provides the first scientific targets for a healthy diet from a sustainable food production system that operates within planetary boundaries for food. This report used 2016 data from the GBD study to estimate how far the world is from the healthy diet proposed.

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Poor Nutrition Could Lead To Sight Loss

Scientists in the United Kingdom (UK) said an unhealthy diet including, high fat and cholesterol-enriched food could contribute to developing eye diseases, which may lead to vision loss. A new study from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom (UK) shows how retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells in the eye become damaged due to poor nutrition. The RPE has several functions, namely, light absorption, epithelial transport, spatial ion buffering, visual cycle, phagocytosis, secretion and immune modulation.

According to the study lead Dr. Arjuna Ratnayaka the study, also revealed a potential new treatment route through which the damaged cells, occasioned by poor nutrition, could be rescued before diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) develop.

Potential new therapies developed along these lines could offer new treatments for some AMD patients. Ratnayaka is a Lecturer in Vision Sciences at the University of Southampton. AMD is an irreversible blinding disease caused by genetics and external factors such as smoking, high blood pressure or being overweight. It affects the central vision, which is used for reading and recognising faces and is a leading cause of sight loss. In the study, the scientists analysed how disease-causing pathways triggered by poor nutrition could impact RPE cells. Damage to RPE cells occur at the onset of AMD, making them less equipped to support eye’s photoreceptors, the cells in the retina which respond to light. The death of photore ceptors lead to permanent sight-loss.

The study determined how healthy RPE cells breakdown by-products generated by daily activities of photoreceptors through the cells’ waste disposal system (which terminates in small vesicles called lysosomes). Scientists found healthy RPE cells had a considerable degree of flexibility to cope with changing conditions in the ageing eye, whereas a high fat diet can disrupt this breakdown process in RPE cells, thus causing long term damage and subsequently sight-loss.

 

Ratnayaka said, “We also found that some lysosomes appeared to remain undamaged even in such stressed RPE, suggesting an altogether new way in which damaged cells could be rescued to prevent eventual sight-loss. “As our results showed how the waste disposal system of the RPE becomes damaged by unhealthy diet-driven disease pathways; our next step is to find out whether this type of damage can be reversed through better nutrition and if stressed or damaged RPE cells can possibly be rescued.”

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Marijuana During Pregnancy Raises Child’s Psychosis Risk

Researchers in the United States (US) said children born to mothers who used marijuana during pregnancy might be at increased risk for psychosis. These are the findings of a new study published in the journal ‘JAMA Psychiatry’. Psychosis is an umbrella term, meaning that an individual has sensory experiences of things that do not exist and/or beliefs with no basis in reality. During a psychotic episode, an individual may experience hallucinations and/or delusions.

Cannabis, also known as marijuana among other names, is a psychoactive drug from the Cannabis plant used for medical or recreational purposes. The main psychoactive part of cannabis is tetrahydrocannabinol, one of 483 known compounds in the plant, including at least 65 other cannabinoids.

The researchers at Washington University in St. Louis analysed data from an on-going nationwide study of child health and brain development. They further explained that Endocannabinoids were part of the naturally occurring neurotransmitter network through which cannabis affects the brain, the researchers. Lead author of the study Jeremy Fine and an undergraduate student majoring in psychological and brain sciences said, “Our research shows that prenatal marijuana exposure after maternal knowledge of pregnancy is associated with a small increase in psychosis proneness during middle childhood or about age 10.” On his part, the study’s senior author, Ryan Bogdan who is Bogdan is an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences, pointed out that the “study raises the intriguing possibility there may be developmental windows during which cannabis exposure may be more likely to increase psychosis risk.”

According to Bogdan, “One possible explanation for the finding of increased psychosis risk for marijuana use following, but not before, knowledge of pregnancy is that the endocannabinoid receptor system may not be in place during the early weeks of pregnancy.”

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New Stool Test Could Spot Liver Disease Years Before Symptoms

Health experts in the United States (US) have raised hope for thousands of patients that are down with liver disease, saying a stool test could detect the condition before symptoms arise without the need for invasive tests. These are the findings of a new study published in the journal ‘Nature Communications’.

The new method looks at bacteria in stool, which can tell doctors if non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is at an early or advanced stage. The stool-based microbiome diagnostic could be available within five years and would cost around £300, the ‘Mailonline’ reported. According to a Professor of Medicine Dr. Rohit Loomba who is part of the research team said, “If we are better able to diagnose NAFLD-related cirrhosis, we will be better at enrolling the right types of patients in clinical trials, and ultimately will be better equipped to prevent and treat it.

“This latest advance toward a non-invasive stool test for NAFLDcirrhosis may also help pave the way for other microbiome-based diagnostics and therapeutics, and better enable us to provide personalised, or precision, medicine for a number of conditions.” Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is when excess fat builds up in the liver due to causes other than alcohol use. NAFLD is related to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. It can be diagnosed by a liver biopsy. Treatment is generally with weight loss by dietary changes and exercise. If left undetected, NAFLD can develop into serious liver damage, including cirrhosis, but it is incredibly difficult to catch early because there are few symptoms and it requires surgery. The estimated prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) worldwide is approximately 25 per cent. However, the real prevalence of NAFLD and the associated disorders is unknown mainly because reliable and applicable diagnostic tests are lacking.

However, researchers at the University of California (UC), San Diego, has identified unique patterns of bacterial species in the stool of people with the condition. The team identified 27 unique bacterial features unique to the gut microbiomes, and thus stool, of people with NAFLD-cirrhosis. They were able to use this non-invasive stool test to pick out the people with known NAFLDcirrhosis with 92 per cent accuracy. But more importantly, the test allowed them to differentiate the firstdegree relative with previously undiagnosed NAFLD-cirrhosis with 87 per cent accuracy. The results were confirmed by magnetic resonance imaging.

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Re-used Cooking Oil May Trigger Breast Cancer Spread

Nutritionists have long discouraged the re-use of cooking oil including vegetable oil, soybean oil, and others, raising alert that such practice could be harmful to health. Now, a recent study in mice showed that reheated cooking oil might trigger cell changes that could promote late-stage breast cancer growth. These findings have been reported in the journal ‘Cancer Prevention Research’ to this end. The American Cancer Society (ACS) recommends that women at average risk for breast cancer should start having annual routine mammograms at the age of 45 years. Even if a person has no signs or symptoms, mammograms can help detect breast cancer at an early stage, which is when treatment is most likely to be successful.

According to the researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, United States (US), who tested “thermally abused frying oil,” which is cooking oil that has undergone reheating to high temperatures multiple times, in laboratory mice, they found that it increased metastatic breast cancer growth. Metastatic breast cancer (also called stage IV) is breast cancer that has spread to another part of the body, most commonly the liver, brain, bones, or lungs. Breast cancer is a disease in which cells in the breast grow out of control.

There are different kinds of breast cancer. Most breast cancers begin in the ducts or lobules. Breast cancer can spread outside the breast through blood vessels and lymph vessels. Cancer cells can break away from the original tumour in the breast and travel to other parts of the body through the bloodstream or the lymphatic system, which is a large network of nodes and vessels that works to remove bacteria, viruses, and cellular waste products.

Breast cancer can come back in another part of the body months or years after the original diagnosis and treatment. Nearly 30 per cent of women diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer will develop metastatic disease. Some people have metastatic breast cancer when they are first diagnosed with breast cancer (called “de novo metastatic”). This means that the cancer in the breast wasn’t detected before it spread to another part of the body. In the current study, the scientists fed all of the lab mice a low-fat diet for a week. Then, they gave some of the mice unheated fresh soybean oil for 16 weeks while the rest ingested thermally abused oil instead.

They chose to use soybean oil because the restaurant industry commonly uses it for deep frying. To simulate breast cancer, they injected 4T1 breast cancer cells into a tibia of each mouse. These breast cancer cells were very aggressive and have a high rate of metastasis to multiple distant sites. As a result, they often appear in the lymph nodes, liver, and lungs.

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How Drinking One Bottle Of Wine Weekly Could Raise Cancer Risk

Drinking one bottle of wine per week has the same lifetime cancer risk as smoking 10 cigarettes. These are the findings of a new study published yesterday in the journal BMC Public Health. The new study in the United Kingdom (UK) estimates that consuming one 750ml bottle of wine per week increases the likelihood of developing cancer even in non-smokers.

The study found that if 2,000 non-smoking men and women drank one bottle of wine per week for the rest of their lives, approximately 10 more of the men and 14 more of the women would go on to develop cancer. The research team said that the comparison between alcohol and cigarettes can help inform the public that moderate levels of drinking were still a public health risk for women, as well as men.

This risk is particularly relevant for women due to the link between middle aged women, breast cancer, and alcohol consumption. The Corresponding author of the study, Dr. Theresa Hydes, said that it has been “well established” that drinking large amounts of alcohol has links to cancer of the breast, mouth, throat, gullet, bowel, and liver. Hydes is a Clinical Haepatology Fellow at the University Hospital Southampton in the UK. “Yet, in contrast to smoking, this is not widely understood by the public,” said Hydes. “We hope that by using cigarettes as the comparator, we could communicate this message more effectively to help individuals make more informed lifestyle choices.

“At an individual level, cancer risk represented by drinking or smoking will vary and, for many individuals, the impact of 10 units of alcohol (one bottle of wine) or five to 10 cigarettes may be very different.” Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumours, which do not spread. One defining feature of cancer is the rapid creation of abnormal cells that grow beyond their usual boundaries, and which can then invade adjoining parts of the body and spread to other organs, the latter process is referred to as metastasising.

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