The Associations Between Consumption of Coffee and Soy Food With Health Outcomes..

Obesity has become a global epidemic, and obesity prevalence rose from 4.8% to 9.8% in men and from 7.9% to 13.8% in women between 1980 and 2008 1. Preventing obesity and related chronic diseases, especially type 2 diabetes (T2D) and cardiovascular disease (CVD), is of crucial public health significance 2. Identification of dietary factors that are beneficial to health is of high priority. This dissertation focused on two kinds of foods, coffee and soy food, and their associations with obesity-related health outcomes. In Chapter 1, the association of coffee consumption with cardiovascular disease has been investigated in numerous epidemiological studies 3-5. However, a key issue that remains to be resolved is the dose-response relationship of long-term coffee consumption with CVD risk, including incidence of coronary heart disease, stroke, and heart failure, and CVD mortality. In the current study, I examined the association between coffee consumption and risk of CVD by meta-analyzing results from 36 prospective cohort studies with 1,279,804 study participants and 36,352 CVD cases. In Chapter 2, the study described in Chapter 1 showed that coffee consumption was non-linearly associ