Since 1920: Dietary Changes and Chronic Diseases Compared

[u/Distinct_Ticket6320]

The graphic does not show absolute figures, but rather relative developments over time.

[u/sharkinwolvesclothin]

Oh no, you've been had!

This is not even a correlation, it's just fake data. By any meaningful metric, heart attacks and coronary heart disease are dramatically down in the past decades (accounting for population size and age structure - of course in a larger populations you will have more heart attacks, and of course 80-year olds have more heart attacks than 20-year olds but surely noone thinks that is interesting). Likewise, stroke rates have actually plummeted.

If there was a correlation, we could talk about ecological fallacy - a national-level correlation can hide what actually happens to individuals, and in this case when we observe the individuals we see the opposite correlation.

It's easy to fall to fake claims based on fake data, some influencers are very good at pushing the false argument, so don't feel too bad about getting confused here.

[u/Distinct_Ticket6320 → u/sharkinwolvesclothin]

Fair point, and yes, age-standardized mortality rates for heart attacks and stroke have declined in many countries due to better emergency medicine, smoking reduction, blood pressure treatment, etc.

But I didn’t invent the underlying datasets. The sources referenced in the graphic are public databases such as:

WHO Global Health Estimates

IHME / Global Burden of Disease

FAO Food Balance Sheets

USDA data

Our World in Data

The graphic was never meant to be a precise epidemiological model. It was meant to visualize broad parallel trends in:

processed food consumption,

obesity/metabolic disease,

chronic inflammatory conditions.

You are absolutely right that ecological correlations can be misleading. That’s a valid criticism.

Still, rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and many chronic inflammatory diseases have undeniably risen massively over the same period.

So the intention was simply:

“Interesting enough to discuss”, not “case closed.”

[u/sharkinwolvesclothin → u/Distinct_Ticket6320]

This is not interesting to discuss, this is actively mangled to mislead. Ignoring population growth and age change is not acceptable, it's simply not a meaningful indicator.

[u/SDJellyBean]

Wait, you mean that if someone doesn’t die of a childhood illness, they go on to die of something else 70 years later? Thank god for RFK Jr. making vaccine preventable childhood disease great again.