For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about how a longstanding study now investigates the health implications linked with religious and spiritual practices.
Since 1991, researchers based at the University of Bristol in the U.K. have been following the lives of 14,000 children and their families from the Avon region in the West of England, tracking details about their health, development, and relationships. Locally known as the ‘Children of the 90s’ project, and also as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), the project is one of the most-detailed longitudinal population studies in the world. Beginning before birth, it has used a “collect everything that may contribute to health” philosophy to track the impact of a multitude of factors on the lives of its participants. To date, it has led to a number of remarkable breakthroughs, including the discovery that oily fish (such as salmon or sardines) eaten during pregnancy is associated with enhanced IQ and improved eyesight of children, and that exercising fifteen minutes a day may cut obesity risk by as much as half. Repeatedly its findings have led to public health policy changes. These include the fact that peanut allergies can result from peanut oil in creams used on babies, leading to warning labels being required on those preparations that still contain peanut (arachis) oil.
Now it is bringing this immense and powerful set of data, from a cohort now in their early thirties, together with their parents, to an area of analysis it had previously barely explored: the role of religion and spirituality in shaping and influencing health over the lifespan. ALSPAC is one of a handful of gold-standard birth cohort studies tracking health outcomes as well as a multitude of biological, clinical, and social measures from its participants. Despite this, up until this year, of the more than 2,000 publications produced from ALSPAC, only two had looked at any of the study’s religion data in relation to health outcomes.