LAUSR

Objectives: To assess the associations of mortality risk with fruit, vegetable, and legume intake in a prospective urban and rural epidemiology study in China (PURE-China). Methods: 43,676 individuals aged 35–70 years and free of cardiovascular diseases at recruitment were followed up prospectively with total observation time of 313,682 person-years. Diet was assessed using a validated food frequency questionnaire. The main clinical outcomes were cardiovascular mortality, non-cardiovascular mortality, and total mortality. Cox frailty models with center as random effects were used to estimate hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) for associations of mortality risk with fruit, vegetable, and legume intake. Results: During a median follow-up time of 8.08 years, 574 cardiovascular death events, 807 non-cardiovascular death events were documented. Overall, median for total intake of fruit, vegetable and legume was 2.79 servings per day. Fruit intake was inversely associated with cardiovascular mortality, non-cardiovascular mortality, and total mortality in the models adjusted for age, sex, and center (Table 1). In adjusted models, total intake was not observed to be associated with cardiovascular mortality (HR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.40–1.20; Ptrend = 0.89), non-cardiovascular mortality (HR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.55–1.27; Ptrend = 0.36), and total mortality (HR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.55–1.06; Ptrend = 0.42), respectively. In further subgroup analyses for separate fruit, vegetable, and legume intake, no statistical significance was found with any mortality risk. Conclusion: Potential protective impacts of fruits, vegetable, and legume intake on mortality risk were not confirmed in our study.