Dairy product consumption and risk of cardiometabolic diseases: Elucidating the role of fatty acids and investigating causality

A healthy diet is important in preventing cardiometabolic diseases such as a myocardial infarction, stroke or diabetes. This thesis investigates whether eating dairy products such as milk and cheese can prevent cardiometabolic diseases. Dairy products partly consist of fat and we have therefore investigated whether fats from dairy decreased the chance of cardiometabolic diseases. We used large studies were people have been followed for a long period of time to see who developed cardiometabolic diseases. These studies confirmed that people who eat more fats from dairy are less likely to develop cardiometabolic diseases. We then wanted to know whether dairy causes a lower risk of cardiometabolic diseases. This is investigated in the second part of this thesis. We compared people with a genetic predisposition to lactose intolerance to people without this predisposition. Since people who are lactose intolerant often have difficulties digesting milk, the two groups mainly differ in their milk consumption. We observed no difference in cardiometabolic diseases between these groups. We concluded that milk does not causally influence the development of cardiometabolic diseases. So far, we do not know whether this is the case for other dairy products such as cheese and yogurt. We therefore looked if a genetic predisposition exists that affects cheese and yogurt consumption. This can be used in future studies to investigate whether eating cheese and yogurt is causally related to cardiometabolic diseases.