Diet Quality and CVD Risk Reduction

This product is free for CV-WELL members.

This webinar was presented live on July 28, 2021.

Dietary risk factors, including poor diet quality, account for a substantial proportion of cardiovascular disease (CVD) related deaths in the United States and globally. Many definitions of diet quality exist, although consistently poor diet quality is associated with increased risk of CVD. Conversely, higher diet quality is associated with lower risk of CVD across the lifespan. Therefore, high quality dietary patterns are recommended for CVD prevention and management. In this webinar, how diet quality is defined, and characteristics of high quality diets will be covered. In addition, recent epidemiological evidence on the association between diet quality and CVD risk across adulthood will be reviewed. Finally, dietary recommendations for CVD prevention and management will be summarized.

CPEU: 1.0
CPE Level: 1
Performance Indicators: 12.3.1, 6.2.3, 6.2.5

Learning Objectives

1. Describe how diet quality is defined including characteristics that are indicators of high diet quality. 
2. Summarize epidemiological research on the relationship between diet quality and CVD.
3. Identify high quality dietary patterns for prevention and treatment of CVD.

Speaker

Kristina S. Petersen, PhD, APD, FAHA

Kristina Petersen has a Bachelor of Nutrition and Dietetics (Honors) from Flinders University (Australia) and a PhD in Nutrition from the University of South Australia (Australia). In addition, she completed postdoctoral training in public health and epidemiology at The George Institute for Global Health (Australia), and in clinical nutrition at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Petersen was an Assistant Research Professor at The Pennsylvania State University from 2018 to 2020. In August 2020 she joined the faculty at Texas Tech University as an Assistant Professor.

Dr. Petersen's research focuses on nutritional strategies to delay and prevent the onset of cardiometabolic diseases. She conducts human clinical trials to examine the effect of individual foods, bioactives and dietary patterns on risk factors for cardiometabolic diseases in at-risk populations. She has over 70 peer reviewed publications and is a member of American Heart Association's nutrition committee.