Unjustified Spinach Hysteria

As I recall the statistics, 60% of all deaths in the US result from circulatory problems, including heart attacks, strokes and the like. Another 20% result from cancers. Two-point-four million Americans dies in 2004, which was 50,000 less than the previous year, a fact celebrated in this article, "USA records largest drop in annual deaths in at least 60 years". (An interesting anti-racism fact in the data: in increase of life expectancy increased more for negros than for honkies!)

This article shows lots of mortality figures for the US, including a claim that in 2000, a whopping 365,000 Americand died due to "Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity," whereas only 75,000 died from "microbial agents", which is very spurious since most such deaths really result from weak immune systems caused by... poor diet!

Surely spinach figures mightily in any effort to reduce "death from poor diets," and it sure seems to me that in the past five years bags of baby spinach has sky-rocketed in popularity. Could this and similar trends contribute to the recent reduced American mortality rates? Given all these FACTS, does it really make sense to DESTROY all the existing fresh spinach in the US, just to stop a few hundred people from getting sick, and two or three old people from dying?

Will this needless hysteria now diminish the previously popular growing appeal of fresh vegitables?