The English may be regularly castigated for their unhealthy diet – but now researchers say it is relatively healthy.
That is England, not Scotland, Wales or Ireland or the United Kingdom as a whole.
A new analysis suggests the "average" diet for England would save thousands of lives if everybody in Great Britain adopted it.
The average English diet – even if it is full of fast food – is still so much healthier than the other countries of the UK that 3,700 lives a year would be saved if everyone ate it, according to an analysis in BMJ Open.
Researchers found the English eat more fruit and vegetables and less food steeped in saturated fat and salt than their neighbours.
Traditional English food was based on roast beef and two vegetables followed by calorie laden puddings such as spotty dick – a fat-laden dough stuffed with raisins or perhaps on fish and chips fried in vats of fat. A modern English family is just as likely to eat pizza or cheap baked beans to help the books balance.
Over a three year period this meant that nearly 22,000 extra people died in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland from heart disease and diet-related cancers, according to Dr Peter Scarborough, of Oxford University, UK.
Victoria Taylor, of the British Heart Foundation, said: "This research isn’t about bragging rights to the English or tit-for-tat arguments about how healthy our traditional dishes might be.
"This is a useful exercise in comparing influential differences in diet across the UK, namely calorie intake and fruit and veg consumption.
"However, saying the rest of the UK should follow England’s lead to cut heart deaths isn’t a foolproof solution; a quarter of English adults are obese and only 30 per cent eat their five-a-day."
BMJ Open November 3 2011 doi 10.1136/bmjopen-2011-000263
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