Social and Biological Mechanisms Underlying the Relationship between Dietary Patterns and Incident 2 Diabetes: A Comparative Study

Description

Type 2 diabetes is a major health issue in Canada, with a prevalence that continues to grow despite billions invested towards treatment and prevention. About 90% of new cases are due to a small number of lifestyle factors including poor diet and inadequate physical activity. While clinical interventions have shown a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes, little emphasis has been placed on lifestyle change including diet at the population level.

Given the growing burden of type 2 diabetes, there is an urgent need to explain the poorly understood mechanisms through which specific dietary patterns promote disease progression at the population level. Thus, my plan of study is to identify the extent to which various mediating pathways explain the association between dietary patterns and type 2 diabetes risk.

Importantly, gender and SES differences in this relationship are understudied, and corresponding prevention strategies may be ineffective by not accounting for these differential effects. Accordingly, a central focus of my project involves a systematic comparison between gender and SES groups as modifiers of the association between dietary patterns and type 2 diabetes risk.

This project will examine previously neglected comparisons between men and women as well as investigate the role of public policy as it relates to fundamental SES constructs including food security and affordable access to healthy foods which are key components of this emerging research area.

Christopher Tait is a third year PhD candidate in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He received a BSc in Human Biology, Health and Society from Cornell University and an MPH in Epidemiology from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He is broadly interested in chronic disease epidemiology and more specifically on factors that underpin sociodemographic and racial disparities in chronic disease risk factors and related outcomes. He has also spent time abroad in Sub-Saharan Africa studying regional differences in chronic diseases in vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries. His dissertation will explore social and biological mechanisms by which diet influences type 2 diabetes risk in the Canadian population.