The problem, of course, is that we don’t eat single nutrients in isolation. A new study, by researchers from Oxford University and the University of Western Australia, has attempted to address this by exploring how dietary patterns affect cardiovascular disease risk. For the observational study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, 116,806 British adults answered questions about what they had eaten the previous day. The participants, with an average age of 56, did this two to five times over the course of a year to give the researchers a better idea of their eating patterns. Five years later, the researchers compared these patterns with hospitalised cases of cardiovascular disease and deaths by any cause.