TY  - JOUR
AU  - Menotti, Alessandro
AU  - Puddu, Paolo Emilio
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/26
TI  - The Inverse Way to Study the Relationship of Diet with Health and Disease
JO  - Recent Progress in Nutrition
SP  - 005
VL  - 06
IS  - 02
AB  - To study the relationship of dietary score versus age at death (AD) in an extinct cohort at 61 years of follow-up, based on an “inverse” procedure. Data from the Italian Rural Areas (IRA) of the Seven Countries Study of Cardiovascular Diseases, made up of 1712 middle-aged men followed for 61 years, were used. The “direct” approach means applying a dietary score to each subject of a cohort and, by means of a model, estimating the probabilities of events for different dietary score levels. The “inverse” approach, instead, compares the levels of the dietary score, separately, in subjects with an event versus those without it. In the “direct” approach, the factor scores from a Principal Components Analysis of 19 food groups were divided into 3 tertiles (more or less healthy than the central tertile), and the levels of AD were estimated and compared across the 3 dietary classes. In the “inverse” approach, the events were divided into 3 groups of different severity (that is different levels of AD) and the actual consumed food groups were computed for each of the 3 classes. Findings compared across the 3 AD classes of the “inverse” approach did not show substantial contradictions with the “direct” approach results, but only some differences with the “direct” approach that selects more statistically significant food groups than the “inverse” one. Plant foods, olive oil, and fish favored higher levels of AD in both approaches, while butter intake had an adverse effect. Mean levels of AD across 3 AD classes were 61.5, 75.1, and 87.2 years, and there were clearly significant trends in consumption of these critical food groups. Two approaches, i.e., “direct” and “inverse,” to study the relationship between dietary score and AD yielded similar findings, forming a reciprocal confirmation.
SN  - 2771-9871
UR  - https://doi.org/10.21926/rpn.2602005
DO  - 10.21926/rpn.2602005
ID  - Menotti2026
ER  -