The UK Diet Diary Consortium, based at the Cambridge Centre for Nutritional Epidemiology in Cancer Prevention and Survival (CNC) and comprising 6 UK cohorts with over 100,000 individuals, will aim to characterise more reliably than previously possible, the associations between dietary factors and CHD. The use of 4-7 day diary methodology on such a large scale makes this a unique consortium of cohorts. To date, 12,000 diaries of approximately 100 different items of diet have been coded and are available for analyses in relation to disease endpoints and gene-nutrient interactions, and by 2009, we expect to have between 6000 and 7000 cases of coronary heart disease, including 2500 from EPIC-Norfolk and 1500 from EPIC-Oxford, making this the largest detailed dietary data set in existence, and an important resource for cardiovascular research.

The UK Diet Diary Consortium will bring together several important factors in methodology, diet and CHD, including i) improvements in the methodology of diet assessment, both through improving primary methods and developing new methods and dietary biomarkers; (ii) improved analytic/statistical methods for investigating diet-disease relationships; (iii) development and identification of intermediate phenotypic markers of disease status, which can be validated in the cohorts to be brought together and applied in future intervention studies, and (iv) the capacity for large scale genotyping to underpin studies of causation and prognosis and investigate gene-nutrient interactions. Further added value of the consortium is the wide range of expertise already involved through the CNC in each of these factors, many of whose members work closely with our group in the ERFC, FSC, LSC and other collaborations.