In this study we are going to look at how different lifestyle factors, like foods eaten, timing or frequency of eating, physical activity, sedentary behaviours and their timing or location, combine together to create an overall behavioural pattern score that indicates whether adolescents have good health. We've previously found that a combination of factors is more important for health compared with single factors alone. We also plan to use a new, reproducible laboratory technique, known as metabolomics, to record over 220 measures of blood that indicate a range of metabolic processes. This will help us find out in much more detail than ever before how behaviour leads to better cardiovascular health via metabolic pathways. When we know more about the pathway that leads from lifestyle to disease we will be better able to predict who will stay healthy and who will not from their behaviours. We also plan to explore how excess body weight (BMI) is related to cardiovascular health via metabolic pathways, which could help to find new ways of breaking the link between high BMI and poor health by developing new medications to target specific bits of metabolism that go wrong when body weight increases.
We'll be using information from diet diaries, activity monitors and blood samples that have already been provided by Children of the 90s participants when they were teenagers. We'll be combining this with information from another group of teenagers that live in Malaysia, using an approach called cross-cultural analysis, which will enable us to be more certain that any associations we see between behaviour and metabolism or metabolism and cardiovascular health are really true and not just coincidental.