Approved research

Development and evaluation of a method to assess nutritional quality of dietary lipids in food

Lay summary

This 4-year PhD project aims to assess how healthy different commonly consumed fats are, with a focus on the impact on cardiovascular disease, cardiometabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, and inflammation and related diseases e.g arthritis. It is also aimed to develop a method that expresses this in a simple score. The need for this is due to different dietary fats having different health impacts, even within the same types or classes of fats. This makes generalised advice not very useful. An example is the advice to limit intake of saturated fats to mitigate the risk of developing cardiovascular disease despite that there are saturated fats that have a neutral or even positive impact on cardiovascular health. Also, as there are generally multiple different fats present within even one item of food it can difficult to make rational decisions. Accordingly, having a simple score, which could be displayed on packaging could help people make more healthy dietary decisions that could help mitigate disease risk.

There are various existing scoring systems that might be altered or a new method might be developed. Health related data from databases such as UK Biobank will be valuable in testing the accuracy of a method.