epigram 2025 issue 4 - MRC Epidemiology Unit

The latest news from the MRC Epidemiology Unit

Welcome to 2025 issue 3 of epigram, the quarterly newsletter from the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge.

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Global Diet and Activity Research Network

Celebrating the achievements of research into cities, climate, and health

GDAR

After eight years, the current iteration of the Global Diet and Activity Research Network (GDAR) draws to a close.

GDAR has been a collaboration of researchers from ten organisations in seven countries on three continents researching how physical, policy and social environments influence diet and physical activity. Based in low and middle income countries, the network of researchers sought to prevent non-communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancers.

The network was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), using the UK aid from the UK Government to support global health research.

The Intersection of cities, climate, and health

The report – Making sense of the evidence at the intersection of cities, climate, and health – summaries eight years of research and impacts.

The report focuses on eight key messages ranging from the opportunities for change presented by the rapid informal urbanisation of cities to the importance of policy makers, civil society, and communities generating local solutions for complex problems.

GDAR reflections

In this blog, Dr Tolu Oni – one of the network’s directors – shares GDAR’s research and legacy. She shares how 60 members from cities as diverse as Belo Horizonte, Yaoundé, Kingston, Kisumu, Lagos, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Cambridge, came together and generated new knowledge on how food and built environments shape health. She discusses how these researchers co-designed interventions with adolescents and communities, and pioneered citizen science approaches.

Inside out: the food we eat to the air we breathe

From lowering greenhouse gasses to which cooked potatoes are better for you, our researchers seek to understand how modern life is challenging our bodies

Planetary health diet linked to a decrease in type 2 diabetes

Researchers from the MRC Epidemiology Unit found that the Planetary Health diet – a diet high in whole grains, fruit, and vegetables and low in animal products and sugary drinks – is more environmentally sustainable and linked to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

The Planetary Health Diet was developed by the EAT-Lancet commission in 2019 to reduce the risk of conditions like type 2 diabetes, while also lowering emission of greenhouse gasses such as methane and CO2.

The research by the Unit’s Dr Solomon Sowah, Dr Fumiaki Imamura, Dr Daniel Borch Ibsen, Dr Pablo Monsivais, Professor Nick Wareham, and Professor Nita Forouhi, scored the diets of 23,700 participants in the EPIC-Norfolk study to see how well they adhered to the planetary health diet. Those in the top 20% of diet adherence had a 32% lower incidence of type 2 diabetes than those in the bottom 20%, and their greenhouse gas emissions were estimated to be 18% lower.

The authors acknowledge that their observational findings do not show that lack of adherence to the planetary health diet causes type 2 diabetes.

Dr Solomon Sowah was quoted in the Independent, stating the purpose of the research and the associations between the planetary health diet and “… lower type 2 diabetes incidence and lower diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

Once published, the paper was included in Research Highlights by the prestigious research journal, Nature.

Read our blog
Read the paper

One potato, two potato, three …

Total and specific potato intake and risk of type 2 diabetes: results from three US cohort studies and a substitution meta-analysis of prospective cohorts was published in The BMJ, and aimed to explore if different types of potato consumption – such as fried chips or boiled potatoes – are associated with the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

The Harvard University–led research team, which included Dr Fumiaki Imamura and Professor Nita Forouhi from the Unit, analysed long-term dietary and health data from more than 200,000 U.S. health professionals who were followed for up to 36 years. Their potato consumption was assessed and the researchers monitored who developed type 2 diabetes over time.

The team also investigated how replacing potatoes with other commonly consumed carbohydrate sources, such as whole grains or white rice, might influence the development of type 2 diabetes.

And in case you were wondering – baked, boiled, or mashed potatoes were not significantly associated with a higher type 2 diabetes risk.

27 ways to make the UK’s food healthier, fairer, and greener

A special issue of The Royal Society journal, Philosophical Transactions B, reports findings from Transforming UK Food Systems (TUKFS), a £47.5 million, five-year-long, UK Research and Innovation funded research programme seeking to transform the UK food system.

The special issue included a paper from the ongoing Mandala Consortium that seeks to create a local research ecosystem in the city of Birmingham, partnering with citizens and food system stakeholders to catalyse urban food system transformation.

In their paper Dr Alexia Sawyer, Dr Kelly Parsons, Professor Jean Adams, Dr Soujanya Mantravadi, Professor Steven Cummins and Professor Martin White discuss how their systems approach enabled the identification of promising food system interventions, and the challenges and collaborative approaches they encountered.

In an accompanying review Martin White, who leads the Mandala consortium, Kelly Parsons and colleagues set out 27 practical ideas to transform food systems for the better, covering farming, manufacturing, supply chains & what ends up on our plates. Kelly Parsons led on the policy theme in this paper.

Read the paper
Read the review

The environmental impact of food production

A study revealed that the impact of food production on species extinction risk can differ by up to a thousand times depending on the type of food and where it is produced.

Food impacts on species extinction risks can vary by three orders of magnitude is a study that was led by members of the Mandala Consortium at the University of Cambridge. The findings – published in Nature Food – provide fresh insights into how changing food policies could help reduce biodiversity loss.

Most of the world’s wild species face extinction through the loss and degradation of natural habitat through the expansion of agricultural land used to produce food, for the increase in the global population. To better quantify the impacts of different foods on species extinction risk, researchers at the University of Cambridge Zoology Department developed Land-cover change Impacts on Future Extinctions (LIFE) metric.

Read the paper

How place shapes our lives

Unit scientists are part of large new research collaborations in the UK and Singapore that seek to better understand how the places we live shape our lives, and to inform policies to improve health and wellbeing.

How air pollution is contributing to dementia

A new analysis of data from almost 30 million people in 51 studies across Asia, Australia, Europe and North America has highlighted the role that air pollution – including car exhaust emissions – plays in the increased risk of dementia.

The findings were published by a team led by Clare Rogowski, MPhil and Dr Haneen Khreis at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and Dr Christiaan Bredell from the University of Cambridge and North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust. Their analysis found that while exposure to three types of air pollutants increased the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the effect seemed stronger for vascular dementia, a type of dementia caused by reduced blood flow to the brain.

Can changing the fabric and organisation of cities create healthy environments?

This July and August, several MRC Epidemiology Unit members were in Singapore working with Cambridge CARES, National University of Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University Singapore on Health-Driven Design for Cities (HD4), an ambitious research collaboration seeking to discover how best to design urban environments that support health.

People living in cities face growing challenges to their health and wellbeing: heat, noise, air pollution and limited opportunities to eat healthily and be physically active. HD4 is investigating how individuals live and move in Singapore, how the urban environment shapes their exposure to health risks, and how this influences their behaviour and health. HD4 is funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under its CREATE programme.

While in Singapore, Unit Dr members Prof Nick Wareham, Dr Søren Brage, Dr Tom Burgoine, Dr Louise Foley, Oliver Francis and Dr James Woodcock have been giving talks in a Summer Seminar Series, meeting with key stakeholders in Singapore government agencies, and working with research colleagues to drive forward the scientific work of the project.

The programme is integrating environmental data with health and behaviour data in the SG100K cohort study, helping us understand how we might change the fabric and organisation of cities to make them healthier for all of us.

Watch the video

UKRI programme seeks to improve outcomes for people and places across the UK

The MRC Epidemiology Unit’s Professor Jean Adams will lead a team of researchers in a £1.57 million project to deliver workshops in local authorities with more deprived populations across England, to develop, implement, and evaluate new policies to reduce local food inequalities.

The funding comes from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), who recently announced it is supporting six projects across the UK. By identifying solutions that promote economic and social prosperity, each project seeks to tackle growing food inequality and improve outcomes for people and places.

£1.53 million has also been awarded to a study aiming to address dietary inequalities and improve the life chances of people living in social housing in Liverpool. Dr Alexia Sawyer of the MRC Epidemiology Unit is a co-investigator on this project led by the University of Liverpool in collaboration with University of Cambridge.

Dates for your diary

Customising Intake24 for your dietary intake research

The online automated dietary recall tool, Intake24, has been through a programme of updates to enable easier customisation for research projects and surveys.

In this webinar Polly Page and Toni Steer, along with other members of the Cambridge Intake24 team, will showcase features of the updated version of Intake24 and, using some recent real life projects as case studies, demonstrate what kinds of customisation are possible.

This seminar is aimed at those who are interested in adapting and using Intake24 in their research or survey programmes.

When: Wednesday 8 October 2025, 13:00 – 14:00 (UK)

Bradford Hill Seminar

At our next hybrid Bradford Hill Seminar, Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Oxford will discuss ‘ The politics of epidemiology and public health in the UK’.

When: Wednesday 15 October 2025, 13:00 (UK)

Find out more and register

Through a series of blogs, videos, and The Confidence Interval Podcast, we explore the research happening at the Unit. Hearing from our researchers as they talk science, people, and population health. We have a plethora of podcasts for you in this edition of epigram!

Putting your best foot forward

New research co-led by Unit scientists – and published in npj Digital Medicine – has shown that the NHS Active 10 app, designed to encourage people to become more active, immediately increased their amount of brisk and non-brisk walking upon using the app.

While activity levels then gradually declined over time, even after 30 months those users who were still using the app were more active than they had been beforehand.

Can recipe boxes give families with school-aged children the opportunity to access more affordable healthy food?

In this episode of The Food Foundation’s podcast – Pod Bites – the Mandala Consortium’s Noah Cooke discusses how families in Birmingham are involved in the Recipe Box research and randomised control trial, which is believed to be the first of its kind.

Listen

Data for Good panel

Unit director Professor Nick Wareham joined a panel of experts to discuss how data can be better shared between the research and commercial sectors to achieve good in society, and the importance of developing frameworks that maintain trust in the process.

Watch

The Confidence Interval Podcast

Subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout, Spotify, and YouTube.

Our publications

The MRC Epidemiology Unit is committed to Open Access and to making our research more accessible, equitable, transparent and reproducible. We aim for all MRC Epidemiology Unit-led papers to be fully available through Open Access as we continue to break down any barriers to knowledge.

You can find all publications from the MRC Epidemiology Unit on our Publications Database: https://publications.mrc-epid.cam.ac.uk/

You can search by journal, year, study, programme, Unit author, and keywords in the title and abstract.

Papers published since the last issue of epigram can be found below:

Long-term air pollution exposure and incident dementia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Best Rogowski CB et al. Lancet Planet Health. (2025)
Quantification of regional variation in ultra-processed food consumption and its sociodemographic correlates across Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka: insights from the South Asia Biobank. Bhagtani D et al. Lancet Reg Health Southeast Asia. (2025)
Are there inequalities in the attendance at and effectiveness of behavioural weight management interventions for adults in the UK? An individual participant data meta-analysis. Birch JM, BMJ Public Health. (2025)
Examining the influence of socio-economic factors on ultra-processed food consumption patterns of UK adolescents. Brody R et al. Public Health Nutr. (2025)
Leveraging Device-Based Physical Activity Assessment to Prepare Children and Young People for a Digital Health Future: A Call for a Rights-Based Approach. Fawkner S et al. J Phys Act Health. (2025)
Industry responses to unhealthy food retail promotion restrictions: a thematic analysis of two public consultations in Scotland. Gomez-Donoso C et al. Public Health Nutr. (2025)
Bidirectional Mendelian Randomization Indicates Causal Relationships Between Circulating Branched-Chain Amino Acids and Metabolic Health. Jia RY et al. Diabetes. (2025)
Continuous Glucose Monitoring Metrics and Pregnancy Outcomes in Women With Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: A Secondary Analysis of the DiGest Trial. Kusinski LC et al. Diabetes Care. (2025)
Total and specific potato intake and risk of type 2 diabetes: results from three US cohort studies and a substitution meta-analysis of prospective cohorts. Mousavi SM et al. BMJ. (2025)
Parent-Child Coparticipation in Physical Activity and Its Associations With Daily Physical Activity and Key Correlates: Findings From the Families Reporting Every Step to Health Study. Paudel S et al. J Phys Act Health. (2025)
Exploring associations between active school environments and children’s physical activity, mental health and educational performance in Greater London primary schools: the Health and Activity of Pupils in the Primary Years (HAPPY) study protocol. Ram B et al. BMJ Open. (2025)
Polygenic prediction of body mass index and obesity through the life course and across ancestries. Smit RAJ et al. Nat Med. (2025)
The impact of deprivation and neighbourhood food environments on home food environments, parental feeding practices, child eating behaviours, food preferences and BMI: The Family Food Experience Study-London. Smith AD et al. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. (2025)
Evaluation of the NHS active 10 walking app intervention through time-series analysis in 201,688 individuals. Yerrakalva D et al. NPJ Digit Med. (2025)
Age-related change in children’s physical activity and sedentary time: The International Children’s Accelerometry Database (ICAD). Atkin AJ et al. PLoS One. (2025)
Constructing Opioid Legitimacy: The Canadian Pain Task Force’s Framing of the Overdose Crisis. Eisenkraft Klein D et al. J Law Med Ethics. (2025)
Towards a collaborative interdisciplinary systems approach to urban food system transformation: a case study from the Mandala research consortium. Sawyer A et al. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. (2025)
The association of the planetary health diet with type 2 diabetes incidence and greenhouse gas emissions: Findings from the EPIC-Norfolk prospective cohort study. Sowah SA et al. PLoS Med. (2025)

About epigram

epigram is the newsletter for everyone interested in work happening at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge.

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