Artigo Acesso aberto Revisado por pares

Cohort Profile: The Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2)

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ije/dym165

ISSN

1464-3685

Autores

Terry Butler, Gary E. Fraser, W. Lawrence Beeson, Synnøve F. Knutsen, R. Patti Herring, Jacqueline Chan, Joan Sabaté, Susanne Montgomery, Ella Haddad, Susan Preston‐Martin, Hannelore Bennett, Karen Jaceldo‐Siegl,

Tópico(s)

Food Security and Health in Diverse Populations

Resumo

How did the study come about?The Adventist Health Study-2 (AHS-2) began in 2002 with the goal of investigating the role of selected foods to change the risk of cancer.AHS-2 is designed to provide more precise and comprehensive results than previous pioneering research among Seventh-day Adventists, 1-6 a unique health oriented population with diverse dietary habits.The Adventist church, of 24 million adherents worldwide, promotes a healthy lifestyle.Church members are expected to be non-smokers and non-alcohol users, and are encouraged to eat a vegetarian diet.Many also avoid caffeine-containing beverages.However, adherence to these recommendations is quite variable.Adventists in North America are almost entirely a non-smoking population.The vast majority are nondrinkers and the small number who consume alcohol do so infrequently.But they have a wide diversity in dietary practices.Two previous longitudinal studies in California showed a small percentage are total vegetarians, many follow a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet or eat meat less than once per week (semi-vegetarian) and about half have omnivorous diets similar to the general population. 7hese studies in California, the Adventist Mortality Study (AMS) 8,9 from 1960-66 and the first Adventist Health Study (AHS-1) 10-13 from 1974-88 indicated that Adventists had lower risks for most cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.Females lived 4.4 years and males 7.3 years longer when compared with the general California population. 7,14These studies also showed the advantage of a vegetarian diet among Adventists, found strong evidence that meat increased risk of colon cancer 13 and coronary heart disease, 11,15 and that nut consumption reduced risk of coronary

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