Dr. Ashkan Afshin is acting assistant professor of global health at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
“I commend the current study’s authors for exploring sociodemographic factors, like ethnicity and education, and their role in the relationship of diet with cardiometabolic disease,” said Afshin, who was not involved in the study.
“This is an area that deserves more attention so that we may fully understand the connection between diet and health,” he said.
The study doesn’t prove that improving your diet reduces risk of death from heart disease, stroke and diabetes, but suggests that dietary changes may have an impact.
“It is important to know which dietary habits affect health the most so that people can make healthy changes in how they eat and how they feed their families,” Afshin said.
The study was published March 7 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
In an accompanying journal editorial, researchers from Johns Hopkins University urged caution in interpreting the findings.
According to Noel Mueller and Dr. Lawrence Appel, the results may be biased by the number of dietary factors included, the interaction of dietary factors and the authors’ “strong assumption” that evidence from observational studies implies a cause-and-effect relationship.
Still, the editorialists concluded that the likely benefits of an improved diet “are substantial and justify policies designed to improve diet quality.”