RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Using genetics to disentangle the complex relationship between food choices and health status
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 829952
DO 10.1101/829952
A1 Nicola Pirastu
A1 Ciara McDonnell
A1 Eryk J. Grzeszkowiak
A1 Ninon Mounier
A1 Fumiaki Imamura
A1 Felix R. Day
A1 Jie Zheng
A1 Nele Taba
A1 Maria Pina Concas
A1 Linda Repetto
A1 Katherine A. Kentistou
A1 Antonietta Robino
A1 Tõnu Esko
A1 Peter K. Joshi
A1 Krista Fischer
A1 Ken K. Ong
A1 Tom R. Gaunt
A1 Zoltan Kutalik
A1 John R. B. Perry
A1 James F. Wilson
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/08/829952.abstract
AB Despite food choices being one of the most important factors influencing health, efforts to identify individual food groups and dietary patterns that cause disease have been challenging, with traditional nutritional epidemiological approaches plagued by biases and confounding. After identifying 302 (289 novel) individual genetic determinants of dietary intake in 445,779 individuals in the UK Biobank study, we develop a statistical genetics framework that enables us, for the first time, to directly assess the impact of food choices on health outcomes. We show that the biases which affect observational studies extend also to GWAS, genetic correlations and causal inference through genetics, which can be corrected by applying our methods. Finally, by applying Mendelian Randomization approaches to the corrected results we identify some of the first robust causal associations between eating patterns and risks of cancer, heart disease and obesity, distinguishing between the effects of specific foods or dietary patterns.