Diet quality in 116 Norwegian men and women with coronary heart disease.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Clinical intervention studies have provided strong evidence that a healthy diet can prevent coronary heart disease. The aims of this study were to describe the diet quality in Norwegian subjects from Sogn and Fjordane County with coronary heart disease, and to investigate if the diet quality was associated with demographic and lifestyle variables. METHODS: We used a self-administered questionnaire to assess information from 116 participants. A Healthy Diet Score (HDS) indicated the diet quality. Multiple Linear regression analyses were used to investigate associations between relevant variables and the HDS. RESULTS: We found that 26.7% of the participants had a poor HDS, 64.6% had a fair HDS and 8.7% had a good HDS. We found that the widespread suboptimal diet quality (poor or fair HDS) was partially related to low consumption of nonhydrogenated mayonnaise products, vegetables, and fruit/berries/juice. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that women had better HDS than men, and that subjects with high education had better HDS than subjects with low education (P < 0.05). CONCLUSION: We found that 91.3% of the participants had a suboptimal diet quality. The consumption of nonhydrogenated mayonnaise products, vegetables and fruit/berries/juice were poor and a principal goal should be to increase the consumption of these food items. Health professionals should keep in mind that gender and educational level may be associated with dietary habits. An important clinical implication of this study is that more attention should be paid to dietary counselling.