The next time you feel really down and out, far more depressed than you know you should be, I want you close your eyes, breathe very deeply, and — with every bit of vocal power you possess —shout out: “AT LEAST I DON’T LIVE IN UZBEKISTAN.”

Pause, repeat the process two more times — and pause again if feel so offended by these words that you’re about to dash off an angry email to one of the bigwigs at this newspaper.

My suggestion is not designed to poke fun at or in any way diminish the severity of clinical depression. Any affliction that affects more than 19 million Americans by creating unshakable feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and hopelessness is certainly no laughing matter. Nor is it an attempt to poke fun at Central Asia’s most populated country.

I was simply searching for a hopefully humorous and definitely dramatic way to draw attention to that country’s eating habits. According to the Global Burden of Disease Study featured in the April issue of The Lancet, Uzbekistanis cannot be making smart food choices.

Uzbekistan has the highest rate of diet-related deaths of any country.

It is so high, in fact, that Uzbekistanis are 10 times more likely to die a diet-related death than Israelis, the people with the lowest rate. (If you’re curious, the U.S. ranks 43rd out of 195 nations.)

But this study merits your attention for another reason.

For the past few weeks, this column has stressed — because too many people foolishly feel otherwise — that every meal you eat to some degree either helps or hurts your overall health. So when what’s possibly the preeminent health publication in the world publishes a study that suggests the same, you need to know about it.

The work led by Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, found that out of the 11 million adults deaths worldwide in 2017, 20 percent of them came from poor diet.

While many of these deaths occurred from malnutrition in third-world countries, Murray and his colleagues still discovered that the consumption of clearly unhealthy foods, such as sugary drinks, “exceeded the optimal level globally.”

That’s a scary thought. How much unhealthy food must be consumed in the affluent countries to create an overall excessive consumption of unhealthy food globally?

Along with crunching the numbers for 2107, the researchers did so for the prior 36 years. The results lead Murray to ultimately state: “This study affirms what many have thought for several years — that poor diet is responsible for more deaths than any other risk factor in the world.”

Besides its ability to delay death, eating well clearly enhances the years before your demise.

An article published this spring in the journal Neurology, for instance, found that those who consistently consume fruits and vegetables at a higher than normal rate retain more of their mental faculties as they age as compared to those who do not. This study spanned 20 years, included more than 25,000 men from the U.S., and based its determinations on seven detailed questionnaires, two of which assessed cognitive function.

The Lancet published a second study this spring that also links better health to better eating. This work used previous data from 185 observational studies and categorized the amount of fiber consumed. Those subjects who ate the greatest amount of fiber had statistically significant reduced rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and colorectal cancer.

Moreover, when compared to those who ingested the least amount of fiber, subjects who consumed the most had up to a 30 percent lower incidence of not only cardiovascular death, but also death from any medical cause.

While the theme of this column is clear, that healthy eating leads to a longer, healthier life, there is one caveat. And it is — to borrow Alexander Pope’s famous line — “a little knowledge [especially dietary] is a dangerous thing.”

So much so, that the April edition of the Tufts Health & Nutrition Newsletter published “‘Plant-Based’ and Unhealthy?”, as a reminder that “a vegetarian diet [or any diet] built on pizza, macaroni-and-cheese, and baked goods may be ‘plant-based,’ but it’s far from a healthy dietary pattern.”

Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, dean of Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and editor-in-chief of the aforementioned publication, summarizes by stating: “Much of what is harmful in the food supply (refined grains, starches, sugars, trans fat) is plant-based. French fries and soda are technically planted-based, vegan and vegetarian, and so are gummy bears, white bread, and ultra-processed breakfast cereals.”