The association between dietary intake and biomarkers for nutrients and disease

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In order to understand how we can use diet to prevent disease we need to have good measures of diet. This is challenging in many countries with multicultural populations, because people of different cultures often differ on many other aspects than diet, and some of these other aspects may be important disease determinants. Statistical techniques can only adjust for such confounding if it has been adequately measured, which is not always possible. Norway is a relatively homogenous population, and we the refore should be ideally suited to provide new information on diet - disease associations. However, Norwegian cohort studies have collected very little dietary information, and what is available is often rather crude and based on traditional foods. Bett er measures of diet are therefore sorely needed. We propose to take advantage of the extensive dietary research done in our department over the past decades, and the continuous monitoring and development of current dietary assessments. In 2008 we used t he most current assessment to collect data on 7000 women. We propose to use these detailed dietary data to develop better important markers of diet that can be used in future data collections in new or ongoing cohort studies. Specifically we propose to identify dietary patterns, and then to relate these patterns to important biomarkers of exposure and disease, including an important biomarker for breast cancer. We will further develop a shorter, more concise dietary measure that will identify these pat terns, and in addition will capture variation in important dietary risk factors (ratio of two types of fat and antioxidant intake), that can be used in subsequent dietary collection in Norwegian cohort studies. This study combines expertise in basic scie nce, epidemiology, dietary research and statistics.