The number of people worldwide whose deaths were tied to avoidable health risks like high blood pressure and smoking has shot up by almost 23 percent since 1990, researchers said Friday. “To put it in plain English, we are behaving badly,” study co-author Ali Mokdad of the University of Washington told AFP. “I mean we know very well that smoking kills and that blood pressure is another killer,” he said by phone.

Later this month, world leaders are set to endorse a U.N. goal to eliminate hunger by 2030, but they will have to convince their citizens to adopt new eating habits first, experts say. The shift, like the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) themselves, must apply to both wealthy and developing nations, where consumption of ecologically unfriendly foods is growing fastest. “Sustainable and healthy diets will require a move towards a mostly plant-based diet,” said Colin Khoury, a biologist at the Colombia-based International Centre for Tropical Agriculture.

For the first time, researchers have identified how some common bacteria found in the gut react during metabolism. An algorithm has been developed that predicts how different candidates will respond to a given diet depending upon the composition of their microbiota, the collective term for gut bacteria, of which there can be up to 1,000 different types. Humans have dramatically different compositions of gut bacteria, according to the paper, and previous research has found links to certain compositions and some diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and arterial hardening, which the research team hope to combat with their new method.