TY - JOUR T1 - Using genetics to disentangle the complex relationship between food choices and health status JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/829952 SP - 829952 AU - Nicola Pirastu AU - Ciara McDonnell AU - Eryk J. Grzeszkowiak AU - Ninon Mounier AU - Fumiaki Imamura AU - Felix R. Day AU - Jie Zheng AU - Nele Taba AU - Maria Pina Concas AU - Linda Repetto AU - Katherine A. Kentistou AU - Antonietta Robino AU - Tõnu Esko AU - Peter K. Joshi AU - Krista Fischer AU - Ken K. Ong AU - Tom R. Gaunt AU - Zoltan Kutalik AU - John R. B. Perry AU - James F. Wilson Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/08/829952.abstract N2 - 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. ER -