Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Heart-related diseases are the number one cause of death worldwide. Children can have high blood pressure and be overweight in early life, which can get carried into adult stages and make them more likely to get heart-related diseases. Therefore, it is important to study lifestyle aspects that influence early childhood growth. Adult studies have found that eating lots of ready-to-eat but high-energy ultra-processed foods (UPFs) is related to a higher chance of getting heart-related diseases. However, there are not many Canadian child studies on this topic. Also, UPFs are becoming more common in retail, replacing healthy whole foods in many people's shopping carts. The objective of this project is to look at how UPFs and heart-related disease risk factors are related, and if there is an effect from replacing UPF with whole foods. This work uses data from the CHILD Cohort Study, which followed many Canadian children and their families from when the mother was pregnant till the child is eight years old. We examined associations between UPF intake at three years of age and heart-related disease risk factors (e.g. body mass index, fat mass percentage, blood pressure) at age eight. We found that high UPF intake was associated with higher fat mass percentage and diastolic blood pressure, and the effect estimates are lower when UPF was replaced with whole foods. This work promotes having more whole foods in children's diet and can inform both clinical and public health settings on the impact of early-life nutrition on heart-related diseases.