An obesogenic DP score at age 13 years, characterized by high energy-density, high total fat and free sugars, and low in fibre density, was associated with a worse cardiometabolic profile at 15 and 17 years old when assessed using a novel metabolomics score consisting of 14 plasma metabolites. The obesogenic DP score at 13 years was inconsistently associated with a worse composite CMR score based on six conventional risk markers (FMI, HDL-c, LDL-c, TAG, MAP, and HOMA-IR) at 15 years, but not at 17 or 24 years. Our results suggest a stronger association between the DP score and the metabolomics score, compared to the conventional CMR score. To our knowledge, this is the first prospective study to find that an obesogenic DP in adolescence is associated with worse cardiometabolic profile, using a multi-marker CMR metabolomic score in a large population of adolescents from three different outcome time points.
A longitudinal study from the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort identified a very similar ‘low fibre, high-energy density, high fat and sugar intake’ DP that was associated with conventional CMR factors (glucose, waist circumference, BMI, insulin, HDL-c, LDL-c, triglycerides) in 14 and 17-years-old adolescents (10). As opposed to our study, this study did not include a metabolomics CMR score and did not track CMR risk from adolescence to young adulthood. In addition, they used some different risk factors for computing the traditional CMR score, and it was conducted on a different cohort, thus the findings may not be transferable to our study. In comparison with our findings, we only found evidence of association between DP and the traditional CMR score for highest versus lowest tertile at age 15, and not at age 17 (or age 24), and not when DP is modelled as a continuous score, suggesting that there is weak evidence of association for this conventional CMR score.
Our findings showing a stronger association between the DP score and the metabolomics score is consistent with previous longitudinal studies on incident type-2 diabetes (69) and CVD (70, 71) which identified metabolite patterns using metabolomics with higher predictive power than conventional risk factors. Metabolomics might improve the identification of subtle metabolic variation from early-stage pathophysiological processes (72, 73), which could explain why stronger evidence was found for the metabolite score when compared to traditional risk factors that are typically still within a healthy range during adolescence. However, as opposed to our analysis, these studies were conducted on adults and did not evaluate the relationship between DP and CMR.
We did not find evidence of a relationship between the obesogenic DP at age 13 years and the metabolomics or the conventional CMR score at age 24 years. These findings are in line with The Northern Ireland Young Hearts Study which included participants at age 12–15 years and followed-up at 20–25 years and did not observe any longitudinal associations between a Mediterranean DP score and individual CMR factors (74). However, a recent prospective analysis from ALSPAC found that a higher Mediterranean-style diet score at age 13 years was associated with a better CMR profile at age 24 (43). In addition, a cross-sectional analysis in young adults within the Raine cohort study (mean age 24.3 years) found that a similar ‘energy-dense, high fat and sugar, low fibre’ DP was associated with higher BMI (75), which is known to be a CMR factor (76). Differences between the DP scores, study designs, and food intakes within each study may explain these discrepancies. The lack of association at age 24 years found in our study could be explained because dietary data was measured at age 13 years, and the period from adolescence to young adulthood is a period of transition on eating behaviour (77, 78). Therefore, diet measurement at age 13 years might no longer reflect how the young adults are eating and could explain why no evidence was found for an association between DP at age 13 and the metabolomics or traditional CMR scores at age 24.
The DP score used in this study has its own limitations. It was calculated from diet diary data, relying on the participant’s response which has known measurement error, including self-reporting bias (79, 80). However, diet diaries are less prone to misreporting than food frequency questionnaires (81), and we estimated the plausibility of dietary reporting and adjusted for in all multivariable regression analyses (66).
A further limitation common to large prospective cohort studies was follow-up bias, because participants included in the current analysis were more likely to be female, have a higher household social class and maternal educational level, and were less likely to be overweight and had lower obesogenic DP scores and better CMR profiles, compared to those with incomplete dietary and covariate data. In addition, a previous study in ALSPAC found that dietary patterns during childhood are associated with several socioeconomic factors, meaning that children with less healthy diets were probably underrepresented in our final study sample (82). This may affect the transferability of the study findings to the overall population although we adjusted for confounders which were previously found to influence the association between DP and CMR factors among participants from ALSPAC (21, 64, 83). Nonetheless, we cannot rule out residual confounding due to inherent bias of observational design studies.
This study has several strengths. Due to its prospective design, we were able to investigate the effect of an obesogenic DP on CMR with 3 repeated measures of outcomes. CMR was assessed at 15, 17 and 24 years which allowed us to evaluate the extent to which this DP at age 13 is associated with CMR throughout adolescence to young adulthood in a relatively large sample. Measures of cardiovascular and metabolic risk, including obesity, dyslipidaemia, elevated glucose and blood pressure, cluster together in children and adolescents (84–87). Therefore, the use of CMR scores provides a more useful summary of overall cardiometabolic health than single risk factors for predicting and preventing CMR. CMR scores are also helpful when analyzing cardiometabolic health in children as they accumulate subtle variation in a range of risk factors that could be too little to show risk on their own in pediatric populations (84, 88). The potential application of metabolomics in identifying CMR is well established, as it provides a comprehensive insight on pathophysiologic mechanisms of diseases (30, 89). However, to our knowledge, this study is the first one to assess the effect of a DP on both metabolomics and conventional CMR scores. Using DPs, rather than isolated nutrients or foods, may better inform about diet-disease associations as they consider the possible interactions between nutrients and foods (11) and it has been suggested that the use of nutrient densities (e.g. energy density, fibre density and % energy from fat) can reduce the error linked to the dietary assessment method (90). Finally, the use of RRR-derived DP allows to better identify a DP that explains the most variation in diet for the development of specific diseases, compared to other a priori dietary assessment methods (91).