A suboptimal diet was responsible for 4.06 million ischemic heart disease deaths worldwide in 2023, according to a new Nature Medicine study based on the Global Burden of Disease 2023 dataset. The analysis also estimated that a poor diet contributed to 96.84 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) due to ischemic heart disease globally in 2023, underlining the continued cardiovascular burden of dietary risk despite progress over the past three decades. Compared with 1990, the number of diet-attributable IHD deaths increased by 41.59%, while DALYs increased by 35.79% in 2023.
However, mortality and DALY rates attributable to suboptimal diet declined by 43.92% and 40.35%, respectively, over the same period. According to the researchers, this suggests that the higher absolute burden is driven largely by population growth and aging rather than worsening dietary risk alone. Among the…
