Author Interviews, Mayo Clinic, Nutrition, Pediatrics, Weight Research / 17.09.2016
Healthy Eating in Adolescence Sets Pattern For Less Weight Gain As Young Adult
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
David R. Jacobs, Jr., PhD
Mayo Professor of Public Health
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, School of Public Health
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis MN 55454-1075
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Project EAT (Eating and Activity in Teens and Young Adults) is on ongoing longitudinal study which began by screening middle and secondary school students in the Minneapolis and St Paul Metropolitan are. Students were the 11-18 years old (average age 15), then followed up at average ages 20 and 25. We had devised an eating pattern in about 2006, which
a) predicts a lot of things in several different studies (including total mortality in the Iowa Women's Health Study) and b) looks a great deal like the recently released 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA).
We call our diet pattern A Priori Diet Quality Score (APDQS) and think of it as close to or in the style of a Mediterranean/prudent/healthy diet.
We hypothesized that this pattern would be associated with lower weight (in general with better long term health, but the focus in Project EAT was weight and BMI), probably least so at age 15. The minimal hypothesized effect in adolescence relates to the very large energy expenditure in adolescent growth years; we thought that diet composition would be less important for body weight at that time than energy intake (and APDQS is about diet composition).
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