37% of Americans have a ‘poor diet,’ down from 49%

Americans appear to be getting better at what they are putting on their plates, as a new study has shown that just 37% of Americans have a “poor diet,” down from 49%.

The study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this week and found that from 1999 to 2020, “the proportion of U.S. adults with poor diet quality decreased from 48.8% to 37.4%.”

Dariush Mozaffarian was one of the study’s authors and serves as the director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University. He shared with Tufts Now that the situation has improved, but the battle isn’t over.

“While we’ve seen some modest improvement in American diets in the last two decades, those improvements are not reaching everyone, and many Americans are eating worse,” Mozaffarian said.

The study used the American Heart Association’s 2020 continuous diet score, which is “based on higher intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and shellfish, and nuts, seeds, and legumes and lower intake of sugar-sweetened beverages, processed meat, saturated fat, and sodium” to complete its research.

The study defined a poor diet as having “less than 40% adherence to the AHA score, intermediate as 40% to 79.9% adherence, and ideal as at least 80% adherence.”

“Our new research shows that the nation can’t achieve nutritional and health equity until we address the barriers many Americans face when it comes to accessing and eating nourishing food,” Mozaffarian said.

The study included results from 51,703 adults who self-reported their diets.