Recent study reveals: the number of deaths among children under five is decreasing. Though overall both men and women around the world are living longer, one in five deaths were linked to poor diet last year.

 

Life expectancy in 2016 worldwide was 75.3 years for women and 69.8 for men. Japan has the highest life expectancy at 84 years and the Central African Republic has the lowest at just over 50. There are a discrepancy of more than three decades between the highest and the lowest lifespans.

 

Agence France Presse: more than 1.6 million people in poor country died from diarrhea caused by contaminated food and water last year, while 2.4 million died from lung infections that mostly could have been prevented or treated. At the meantime, two million mothers and newborns died from complications at birth that rudimentary health care could have largely avoided.

 

According to six studies published in The Lancet, a leading medical journal, AIDS and tuberculosis each took away more than a million lives, while malaria killed over 700,000 people. Although the trend lines have declined over the last decade for these infectious diseases, viral hepatitis killed 1.34 million people in 2016 – 20% more than in 2000, according to the World Health Organization. Nearly 55 million people died last year, but 129 million were born, leaving a net gain of 74 million humans in the world.

 

For the year of 2016, nearly three quarters deaths were caused by non-communicable diseases, with ischemic heart disease as the leading cause worldwide that took away 9.5 million lives, increasing nearly 20 percent in a decade. Similarly, mortality due to another so-called “lifestyle” disease, diabetes, increased more than 30% over the same period to 1.4 million. Cancers, are also on the rise, killing 9 million people, 17% more than in 2016. Tobacco is blamed for 7.1 million deaths.

 

Surprisingly, the study finds that poor diet is linked to one in five deaths worldwide when combining the two extremes of inadequate nutrition and unhealthy eating in richer countries. The researchers concluded: “Among all forms of malnutrition, poor diet is the leading risk factor for mortality.”

These studies, based on the 2,500 experts, also show that one in seven people (1.1 billion), are living with mental illness and substance use disorders. Severe depression ranked among the top ten causes of illness in all but four of the 195 countries and territories covered.

 

Last year, the global population suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease reached up to 2.6 million, more than 40% surge from only ten years ago. Alcohol and drug use accounted for about 310,000 deaths, including 86,000 for opioids. Opioid abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. Deaths caused by conflict and terrorism, especially in North Africa and the Middle East, exceeded 150,000 in 2016, a jump of 140% than a decade year earlier.