About a decade ago, the American Heart Association expressed concern that their 2020

target of improving cardiovascular health by 20 percent by 2020 would not be reached if current trends continued.

By 2006, most people were already not smoking and had nearly achieved their goal for exercise,

but when it came to healthy diet score, only about 1% got a 4 or 5 out of their 0-5 diet quality score, and that's with so-called

ideal criteria being like drinking less than 4.5 cups of soda a week.

In the last decade, they saw a bump up to like 1% of Americans even reaching this kind

of basic criteria.

But given their aggressive goal of improving that by 20 percent by 2020, they hope to

turn that 1 percent into like 1.2 percent.

Okay, so how'd we do?

Let's look at the 2019 update, and it looks like we've slipped down to as low as 1 in

a thousand.

You can't even see the green anymore, and American teens got a big fat zero.

No wonder, perhaps, that for all mortality-based metrics, the U.S. rank declined like

27th or 28th among 34 industrialized countries.

Citizens living in countries with a substantially lower GDP and health expenditures per capita have lower mortality rates than those in the United

States. Slovenia beat us by three countries, coming in at 24th and life expectancy to our 27th.

And more recently, we seem to have slipped to 43rd, even though we spent trillions on

health care more than anyone else.

What's the leading risk factor for death in the United States?

What we eat.

The standard American diet is just to die for, literally.

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