A new global study released by The New York Times proves that your mum was right, you should be eating your greens. A staggering one-fifth of all deaths worldwide have been attributed to poor diets; those defined as low in fresh vegetables, seeds, and nuts, and instead high in sugar, salt and trans fats.

Published this week in The Lancet, the report also explored the longevity associated with different food groups. Those who were regularly consuming a variety of fish, whole grains and vegetables were associated with a longer life, with those who ate diets devoid of these groups far more likely to die prematurely.

The study further claimed that in 2017 there were 11 million deaths attributed to poor diets that could have been avoided. Just under 10 million of these were the result of cardiovascular disease, nearly 1 million due to cancer, and a further 339,000 related to Type 2 diabetes.

The study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and investigated global eating habits from 1990 to 2017, tracking consumption across 15 different food categories in 195 separate nations. Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, China, and the Marshall Islands were declared to have the highest number of diet-related deaths, while France, Spain and Peru had the lowest.

Interestingly, the study concluded that rather than focusing on reducing fat and sugar intake, the global community should simply instead focus on including more health food groups in daily diets. The only exception to this rule was high levels of salt, which the study strongly associated with illness and death.

“Let’s not just focus on the things we should be cutting out of our diet because to be honest, we’ve tried that for a while,” Dr. Nita Gandhi Forouhi of the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine commented in a post that accompanied the study.