Using genetic variation to disentangle the complex relationship between food intake and health outcomes.

ABSTRACT: Diet is considered as one of the most important modifiable factors influencing human health, but efforts to identify foods or dietary patterns associated with health outcomes often suffer from biases, confounding, and reverse causation. Applying Mendelian randomization in this context may provide evidence to strengthen causality in nutrition research. To this end, we first identified 283 genetic markers associated with dietary intake in 445,779 UK Biobank participants. We then converted these associations into direct genetic effects on food exposures by adjusting them for effects mediated via other traits. The SNPs which did not show evidence of mediation were then used for MR, assessing the association between genetically predicted food choices and other risk factors, health outcomes. We

SUBMITTER: Pirastu N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9162356 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature