On Monday 22 June 2026 at 13:00, Fie Langmann defends her PhD dissertation entitled “Legume consumption and hepatobiliary health”.

A new PhD project from Aarhus University, Health, has investigated the association between replacing red and processed meat, poultry, or fish with legumes and the risk of developing metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease and gallbladder disease.

In 2021, the National Danish Dietary Guidelines were updated to recommend consuming 100 g of legumes daily with the aim of improving population health and reducing the climate impact of our diet, emphasising the recommendation ‘Eat less meat – choose legumes and fish’. Despite this, evidence on the association between legume intake and hepatobiliary health remains limited.
To elucidate this association, I conducted a scoping review to map the current literature on the topic and modelled substitution analysis in a time-to-event framework using data from the UK Biobank. The substitution studies investigated consumption of 80 g/week of legumes instead of 80 g/week of red and processed meat, poultry, or fish and the risk of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease and gallbladder disease over a median follow-up period of 10 years.

I found that consuming legumes instead of red and processed meat or poultry was associated with 3-4 % lower risk of developing metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease and gallbladder disease while no association was found when replacing fish.

The summary is written by the PhD student.

The defence is public and takes place in Samfundsmedicinsk Auditorium, 1262-101, Aarhus University. Please see the press release for more information. 

Contact

PhD student Fie Langmann
Mail: fie@ph.au.dk 
Phone: +45 28199110

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