Poor quality diet is associated with increased risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, many forms of cancer and mental illness. Poor quality diet is the top contributor to mortality globally, and is estimated to cost the NHS £6billion per year.
The period of adolescence to early adulthood is the time when prevalence of overweight and obesity develops most rapidly, making this an important time to understand the contribution of diet to these developing risk factors. Adolescence and early adulthood is a time of rapid personal development and changing lifestyles. It also is the time when adult behaviours, including adult dietary patterns, are developed and established. Understanding the factors that influence development of adult diet is an important first step in developing strategies to change behaviour.
However, there has been little assessment of diet in young adults. Online tools (INTAKE24) are now available that make reporting on nutritional intake easier, allowing online completion of recalls of daily intake, and automated data processing. These validated tools make the collection of diet data in large samples more feasible, and are now being implemented in large-scale dietary surveys across many countries by researchers at the MRC Epidemiology Unit.
This application focusses on assessing the diet of young adults (age 28-30) in the ALSPAC cohort. This data will then be used together with other data collected within ALSPAC, or from linked datasets, to understand (1) the changes in environment and lifestyle which help to explain why individuals have adopted their current diets, and (2) the relationships between diet and measures of heart and blood health. The data will also be available for further research studying associations between diet at age 30 years and longer term measures of health and disease.