Declining the prices for nut items nutritious food items as fruits, vegetables and nuts could save millions of lives per year, suggest a new study.
Besides, drastically increasing the tax rates on junk foods including sugar-sweetened beverages and red meat could reduce the mortality rate caused by diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
The findings revealed that if the prices of all the seven dietary items like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts seeds, processed and unprocessed red meats and sugary drinks were changed 10% each, an estimated 23,000 deaths per year could be prevented.
A 30% price change almost tripled that estimation by 63,000 deaths prevented per year or 9.2% of all cardiometabolic disease deaths.
"We found that modest price changes on healthy and unhealthy foods would help decrease overall cardiometabolic deaths. The largest changes were viewed after reducing the prices of fruits and vegetables and increasing the price of sugary drinks," said Jose L. Penalvo, Assistant Professor at the Tufts University in Boston, the US.
While taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages drastically bring down diabetes deaths, subsidies on fruits and vegetables reduced numerous death caused by stroke. The study was published in the journal BMC Medicine.
Study results suggest that financial incentives to purchase healthy food items such as fruits and vegetables, and disincentives to purchase unhealthy food like red meat and sugary beverages, could prove successfully bring down cardiometabolic disease inconsistency.
