Eating to Live
The Japanese now have the world’s highest life expectancy, surpassing Americans in the 1970s and Swedes in this decade. Those who have sought the reasons for this achievement think that the answer is obvious. Dr. William Castelli is the director of the Framingham, Mass., project that for the last 38 years has been intensively studying thousands of Americans to assess their risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. Along with other experts, he is convinced that the main reason Japanese live long lives is their healthy diet.
The Japanese diet tends to be low in fat and high in fiber, heavy on fish, vegetables and grains, light on beef and dairy products. This is pretty much just the opposite of how most Americans eat. In consequence, the Japanese have cholesterol counts that are 20% or more below those typically found in the United States and one of the world’s lowest levels of heart disease. That diet rather than genetics is responsible can be strongly inferred from studies of ethnic Japanese living in the United States. Japanese-Americans, who tend to eat a traditional American diet, typically have cholesterol levels and heart-disease rates higher than residents of Japan.
All of which brings us to U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s latest report, which is based on several thousand studies of the relationship between diet and disease. The report concludes that “diseases of dietary excess and imbalance” each year lead to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths. Of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States, five are now seen as being diet-related. Specifically, a diet too high in fats and too low in vegetables, fruits and grains clearly raises a person’s risk of heart disease, some cancers, stroke, adult-onset diabetes and atherosclerosis.
None of this comes as news to health professionals. But to a great many, perhaps most, Americans the link between diet and disease continues at the least to be underappreciated. This ignorance or lack of interest helps perpetuate a major and an increasingly costly public-health problem. Yet, as Koop writes, better health for all Americans is well within reach.
Government has no responsibility for dictating dietary choices. It does have the responsibility to help people make informed decisions about what they should eat to reduce their risk of developing certain life-shortening illnesses. Requiring food products to be clearly labeled is one important approach. Anti-regulators will claim that such action would be unwarranted interference in the marketplace. There’s nothing unwarranted, though, about helping people to avoid dying prematurely. The surgeon general’s report describes the problem. The next step is acting responsibly to deal with it.
