Changes in the Dietary Habits of the Greek EPIC Cohort Participants during a 14-Year Follow-Up Period (1997-2011).

Nikolaos Skourlis,Antonia Trichopoulou,Ioannis Patsis,Eleni Peppa,Klea Katsouyanni,Georgia Martimianaki

doi:10.3390/nu12072148

Nikolaos Skourlis, Antonia Trichopoulou + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12072148

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to evaluate the changes in the nutritional behavior of the Greek EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) cohort participants regarding the consumption of basic food groups, during a 14-year period (1997–2011). In the Greek segment of the EPIC cohort study (EPIC-Greece), the changes in dietary habits of 23,505 participants regarding several food items/groups (vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts, dairy, cereal, meat, fish/seafood, olive oil) were recorded repeatedly over time and compared to the baseline assessment (1994–1997), using a short, qualitative, follow-up questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to study the trends in nutritional behavior over time and ordinal logistic regression models to study the associations between the ordered responses of the questionnaire and sociodemographic and health factors. More participants reported an increase rather than a decrease in the consumption of vegetables, fruits, fish/seafood, whilst the inverse was observed for dairy products, nuts, cereals, and meat. No prevailing trend was noted for legumes and olive oil. Factors such as being female and having high education relate to more positive (healthy) changes in nutritional behavior. There seems to be primarily a change to a more healthy nutritional behavior of the EPIC-Greece participants over the follow-up period, with different participant subgroups presenting different degrees of nutritional changes.

Highlights

Dietary habits vary over time [1,2,3,4] and are correlated with a wide range of individual characteristics, such as biological, demographic, psychological, situational and socio-cultural on an interpersonal level [5]
Due to the heterogeneity of dietary habits between different population subgroups, it is of high priority to study the nutritional trends in association with socioeconomic, demographic and health factors as part of well-designed policy plans and strategies to address nutritional trends towards more unhealthy patterns of consumption, and specify the subgroups that should be the main focus of these policies
Table 2; Table 3 provide the descriptive statistics for selected baseline characteristics of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Greece participants and the quartiles of baseline food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) consumption of the food groups/items of interest

Summary

Introduction

Dietary habits vary over time [1,2,3,4] and are correlated with a wide range of individual characteristics, such as biological, demographic, psychological, situational and socio-cultural on an interpersonal level [5]. The association between dietary behavior and health has been studied intensively over the last decades, the literature in the area of nutritional epidemiology is very extensive and the evidence of association can vary from weak to strong depending on the health outcome studied [6,7,8] It is of high public health importance to recognize trends in the dietary habits of a population. With the use of appropriate statistical models, the information provided by qualitative follow-up questionnaires can be used to study the association between a large number of sociodemographic, somatometric and health status factors, as well as for the assessment of nutritional trends

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