Skip to navigation Skip to main content Skip to footer

Approved research

Dietary fats, carbohydrates and the risk of cardiovascular disease in the UK Biobank study

Principal Investigator: Dr Jennifer Carter
Approved Research ID: 13055
Approval date: July 3rd 2015

Lay summary

There is substantial uncertainty regarding the associations of dietary fat with coronary heart disease (CHD) risk. Experimental studies indicate that saturated fat is a determinant of LDL cholesterol, but observational studies show no association between saturated fat and CHD. Some of these mixed results may be due to difficulties in measuring diet, and thus new research should combine multiple measurements of food consumption to examine fat and sugar intake with cardiovascular risk factors such as blood pressure, body mass index, diabetes, and blood biomarkers. Such research will inform national guidelines regarding the optimum dietary guidelines for prevention of CHD. This is health-related research that is in the interest of the public good. Dietary data from the 210,000 participants that completed 24-recall diet questionnaires multiple times will be collated and the reproducibility from these repeat measurements will be assessed. The consumption of major food groups on the food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) reported by the full cohort will also be examined, and its reproducibility will be calculated from the subsample of ~25,000 that were followed up a second time. Using these more reliable assessments of food groups and nutrients, the associations between ?typical diet?, cardiovascular risk factors and cardiovascular disease will be examined. These analyses will use the 210,000 participants that completed the 24-hour recall diet questionnaire every 3-4 months (total: 450,000 questionnaires). Dietary intake will also be examined within the full cohort that completed the food frequency questionnaire (FFQ), and the subsample of the full cohort (~25,000) that were followed up a second time with the FFQ.