NCDS: Key findings

Key findings

Dietary trends and dietary patterns in adulthood

Two studies examined trends in food consumption over this nine year period between 1991 (33 years) and 2000 (42 years) [64, 65].

For both men and women, dietary habits were slow to change [64, 65].

At 33 years, there was evidence that higher educational attainment was associated with consuming  fruit, salad or raw vegetables more frequently and chips and fried food less frequently compared with lower attainment [64].

Parsons et al. created a dietary quality score using these data [65]. Briefly, the authors treated fruit and salad as ‘healthy’ foods with consumption frequencies classified from 1 (least frequent) to 5 (most frequent). Chips, sweets, biscuits and fried food were classified as ‘unhealthy’ foods with consumption coded in reverse from 5 (least frequent) to 1 (most frequent) so that a higher value indicates better diet quality. As assessed by this measure, overall improvement in diet quality between 33 and 42 years was found to be very small [65].

One study compared dietary intake between NCDS and the 1970 British birth cohort which is discussed on the 1970 British Birth Cohort page.