Background: Canada's Food Guide (CFG) was profoundly revised in 2019, but the extent to which adherence to recommendations on healthy food choices reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is unknown.
Objectives: The aim of this study was to examine how greater adherence to the 2019 CFG's recommendations on healthy food choices influences the risk of incident CVD.
Methods: Participants were a sample of adults without history of CVD, diabetes, or cancer from the UK Biobank prospective cohort study. Usual dietary intakes were estimated by modeling data from repeated Web-based 24-h dietary recalls using the National Cancer Institute multivariate method. Adherence to key CFG recommendations on healthy food choices was assessed using the Healthy Eating Food Index (HEFI)-2019, which has a maximum of 80 points. The CVD outcome was a composite of fatal and nonfatal myocardial infarction and ischemic stroke. Cox regression models adjusted via inverse probability weighting were used to estimate CVD risks. Counterfactual models were used to interpret risks of hypothetical changes in the HEFI-2019 score.
Results: A total of 136,698 participants met the eligibility criteria (55% females; mean age: 57.2 y; range: 40-75 y). During the 11-y follow-up, there were 2843 cases of incident CVD. Compared with no change in the HEFI-2019 score, increasing the HEFI-2019 score of all participants to the 90th percentile of the score distribution (58.1 points) hypothetically reduced the risk of CVD by 24% (RR: 0.76; 95% CI: 0.58, 0.94; absolute risk difference: -0.58%).
Conclusions: These results suggest that greater adherence to the 2019 CFG recommendations on healthy food choices reduces the 11-y risk of CVD in middle-aged and older adults.
Keywords: 24-h dietary recalls; CFG; CVD; Canada's Food Guide; HEFI-2019; Healthy Eating Food Index; cardiovascular disease; causal inference; dietary guidelines.
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Nutrition.