Background and aims: Great discrepancies exist in results from studies examining the association between dietary patterns and cardiovascular disease (CVD) in different populations. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the Australian Dietary Guidelines (ADG) 2013, Mediterranean-DASH diet Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND), Paleolithic and Okinawan dietary patterns and CVD respectively.
Methods and results: In this cross-sectional secondary analysis of the 2011-12 Australian Health Survey, adults who self-reported physician-diagnosed CVD, completed two multiple-pass 24 h recalls and had no missing data on all confounders were analysed (weighted n = 5376; 295 CVD cases). Dietary intake was transformed to represent usual intake by the multiple source method. The score of Healthy Eating Index for Australian Adults (HEIFA-2013) was adopted for ADG 2013, while the scores of MIND, Paleolithic and Okinawan dietary patterns were constructed by separating the intake of each predefined food and nutrient into quintiles. The associations between the dietary patterns (as tertiles of scores) and CVD were examined using binary logistic regression adjusted for significant cardiovascular risk factors. Higher adherence to the Okinawan diet pattern was significantly associated with a reduced prevalence of ischemic heart disease (IHD) (OR per unit increase in dietary pattern score: 0.94, 95%CI: 0.90-0.98). Comparing its extreme tertiles, the OR was 0.49 (95%CI: 0.29-0.82; ptrend < 0.01). The associations between HEIFA-2013, MIND and Paleolithic diet patterns and CVD were insignificant.
Conclusion: The findings suggested an inverse association between adherence to Okinawan dietary pattern and prevalence of IHD in Australian adults.
Keywords: Australian; Australian healthy survey; Cardiovascular disease; Dietary pattern; Healthy diet; MIND diet; Okinawan diet; Paleolithic diet.
Copyright © 2020 The Italian Society of Diabetology, the Italian Society for the Study of Atherosclerosis, the Italian Society of Human Nutrition, and the Department of Clinical Medicine and Surgery, Federico II University. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.