Starting a food and activity diary

This course is all about exploring the risk factors and prevention of cardiovascular disease. To understand this better we suggest you keep a diary that collects information on your daily diet and physical activity.

The aim of this is to investigate the lifestyle risk factors for cardiovascular disease. By starting the diary and continuing throughout the course, you will have a selection of data to use to assess your own risk of cardiovascular disease. How you use this information is up to you, but we hope that this will help you to better understand how what you learn throughout the course could affect your own health.

Although we have yet to cover the theory of this topic, you might be aware that your diet and activity levels have a big impact on your health. Risk factors can be broadly divided into things we can change and things we can’t.

This activity focuses on the some of the risk factors that we can change, such as our lifestyle.

You should use the following instructions in the Guide to using your food and activity diary to monitor your diet and activity levels until Week 4. The food diary is a modified version of the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer (EPIC)-Norfolk 7 day diet diary. The activity diary is a modified version of the Core Questions on Physical Activity in EPIC Baseline Questionnaires.

Therefore, we would like to acknowledge the contribution of the staff and participants of the EPIC-Norfolk Study and also the Epidemiology Unit, Medical Research Council, Cambridge, UK. EPIC-Norfolk is supported by the Medical Research Council programme grants (G0401527,G1000143) and Cancer Research UK programme grant (C864/A8257).