Reported associations between consumption of fried foods and obesity or weight gain
make likely that fried food consumption might also be linked with the development of
hypertension. However, evidence from long-term prospective studies is scarce.
Therefore, the aim of our study was to longitudinally evaluate this association in a
prospective cohort. The SUN project is a Mediterranean cohort study of university
graduates conducted in Spain, that started in December 1999 and until now it is
permanently open. For the present analyses we included 13,679 participants (5,059 men
and 8,620 women), free of hypertension at baseline with a mean age of 36.5 y
(SD:10.8). Total fried food consumption was estimated at baseline. The outcome was
the incidence of a medical diagnosis of self-reported hypertension during follow-up. To
assess the relationship between fried food consumption and the subsequent risk of
developing incident hypertension during follow-up, Cox regression models were fitted.
During a median follow-up of 6.3 years, 1,232 incident cases of hypertension were
identified. After adjusting for potential confounders, the adjusted hazard ratio for
developing hypertension was 1.18 (95% CI: 1.03-1.36) and 1.21 (95% CI: 1.04-1.41)
for the categories of consumption of 2-4/week and >4/week respectively, compared to
those who consumed <2 servings/week (p for trend 0.020). In conclusion, our findings
suggest that a more frequent consumption of fried foods at baseline was associated with
higher risk of hypertension during follow-up in a cohort of university graduates
