HCS: key findings

Participants of the HCS born between 1931 and 1939 unsurprisingly had different infant feeding patterns compared to what can be seen today. For instance, over half of the participants were breastfed and there was no association between socioeconomic position (SEP) at birth and type of infant feeding [20, 28].

This is useful because unlike associations from later generations, relationships between infant feeding and health outcomes are unlikely to be confounded by SEP. Breastfeeding in this cohort was associated with greater adherence to a prudent dietary pattern with authors of this study suggesting that early feeding may be linked to later food choice [10, 20].

Dietary data from the baseline FFQ have been used to identify dietary patterns (DP) using principal component analysis (PCA). Two main dietary patterns were identified using data from the HCS participants at baseline:

1. a diet characterised by high consumption of fruit, vegetables, oily fish and wholemeal cereals termed a “prudent” dietary pattern and
2. a diet characterised by high consumption of vegetables, processed and red meat, fish and puddings called a “traditional” dietary pattern [29].

The FFQ data in HCS have also been used to develop a shorter 24-item FFQ that has the ability to define the prudent dietary pattern in a comparable way to the full FFQ [24]. This tool has the potential to benefit future studies that are interested in capturing information on diet quality of older participants but do not have the capacity to complete a long FFQ.