O di Ólos 94 Is it true that it always rains in Seattle, as Tom Hanks complains in the movie Sleepless in Seattle? [laughing] Yeah, that’s true. Prof. Afshin, your research is quite famous in Italy, because we are very interested in the dietary risk’s topic. There is where the Mediterranean Diet was born, and we suppose to have the best diet in the world. Why did you start to examine a subject of research as singular as Health Effects of Dietary Risks? This work was born as part of the Global Burden Global Burden of Diseases [GBD] Study. GBD is a project aiming . GBD is a project aiming to estimate the disease load attributable to dietary risk factors across 195 Countries. IHME annually . IHME annually evaluates those risks, and then we publish the overall results for hundreds of factors - including the dietary ones - in the journal Lancet. Each year we try to expand our estimates by including more detailed sources and improving the method of investigation. So, this associated diet study was conducted as a part of the most recent cycle of the GBD study and it basically started in 2017; the overall finding was published in 2018, in the Medical Journal, while the project related to diet was finalized in April, 2019 in Lancet. Your research’s most important finding is that an unbalanced diet provokes more deaths than tobacco and alcohol in the world. It seems difficult to believe… Yes, that’s true. As a part of Global Burden of Diseases, we had the chance to compare the dietary factors with other health risk factors. And we found that globally, in many Countries, suboptimal diet stands as a factor responsible for more deaths than any other risk. A factor greater than high blood A factor greater than high blood pressure, tobacco use, and also air pollution of the cities. You conducted a massive study about data. You started from big data in order to reach this impressive finding, is it correct? Yes. As a part of this study, we tried to create the most comprehensive data source about the dietary consumption. We basically included all the available . We basically included all the available ones on consumption of foods and nutrients: this included data on consumption, data on household expenditure, different food item data and also data on availability of different products. Then we harmonized them by making a composure adjusting the different biases, and subsequently by using a physical approach to estimate the consumption of 15 dietary factors. I will quote some of them: red meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, fiber, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. You represent the first signature of this study, but how many people were involved in this huge research? Thanks for asking. The Global Burden of Diseases project is a collaborative effort involving more than three thousand scientists from all over the world. In the diet part, . In the diet part, more than three hundred people contribute to the contribute to the project, with different capacities in terms of contributing data, reading the result, or writing the comments. At different stages come different contributions. It is challenging, and on the other hand we are fortunate to have all these great people contributing providing data and expertise, which improve the quality of our work. And this is how you discovered that every dietary factor seems to be far from its optimal level of consumption, which increases dietary risks for people’s health. Yes; what we found is that most dietary factors’ level of intake, for the majority of the Countries, is not optimal, and from the global overall we also saw that, according to the healthy dietary factors, their
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