Purpose Cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer mortality rates in Eastern Europe are among the highest in the world. Although diet is an important risk factor, traditional eating habits in this region have not yet been explored. This analysis assessed the relationship between traditional dietary pattern and mortality from all-causes, CVD and cancer in Eastern European cohorts. Methods Data from the Health, Alcohol and Psychosocial factors in Eastern Europe prospective cohort were used, including participants from Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. Based on food frequency questionnaire data, we constructed an Eastern European diet score (EEDS) from nine food groups which can be considered as traditional in this region. The relationship between categorical (low, moderate, high) and continuous (range 0-18) EEDS and mortality was estimated with Cox-regression. Results From 18,852 eligible participants, 2234 died during follow-up. In multivariable adjusted models, participants with high adherence to the traditional Eastern European diet had significantly higher risk of all-cause (HR 1.23; 95% CI 1.08-1.42) and CVD (1.34; 1.08-1.66) deaths compared to those with low adherence. The association with cancer mortality was only significant in Poland (high vs. low EEDS: 1.41; 1.00-1.98). From the specific EEDS components, high consumption of lard was significantly positively related to all three mortality outcomes, while preserved fruit and vegetable consumption showed consistent inverse associations. Conclusion Our results suggest that traditional eating habits may contribute to the poor health status, particularly the high CVD mortality rates, of populations in Eastern Europe. Adequate public health nutritional interventions in this region are essential.

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Ever since the inception of their discipline historians have tried to distance their work from myths, disentangle them and interpret them historically. But historical narratives, while certainly not myths in the ancient form and meaning, nevertheless often perpetuate mythic features-history has not been immune to fiction, stereotype, distortion, exaggeration, and omission. Like myth, history tends to reduce the diversity and complexity of events to one particular model of interpretation or to provide answers without ever clearly and explicitly formulating the problem. Most important, historical narrative, like myth, exercises a strong cognitive dynamic in the definition of a community's ethical and political principles. Emerging in 'the age of nationalism', modern history writing was more often than not entangled in the web of 'nationhood myths'. In his famous speech at the Sorbonne in 1882, Ernest Renan asserted that to get one's history wrong is an essential part of the making of a nation. Historians figure prominently among the architects of nationalism; they are able 1 to provide meaning to the projects of the present through an interpretation of the past. Erich Hobsbawm has pleaded for the exposure of nationalist history as myth to safeguard the objectivity of the history profession. The historian of Eastern Europe Hugh Seton-Watson 2 has criticized historians for 'excesses of patriotic myth-making', which he sees as a result of the influence of the times and 'the compulsions to which [historians] were or still are subjected' in their effort to define a national identity. This compulsion of a nationalist 3 political agenda increases scholarly production of myths about a nation's alleged antiquity,