Project description
Taking a big bite out poverty
Both a cause and a consequence of poor health, poverty puts people at greater risk of various health and social problems. Studies show the socially disadvantaged have the poorest diets and they die early because they get sicker faster. The EU-funded PIDS project will explore possible interventions such as improving the diet of the disadvantaged. Specifically, the project will test the hypothesis that the social patterning of executive function results in information-based nutrition interventions. Newly developed immersive digital reality methods will be used to study dietary choice, while laboratory feeding paradigms will be used to examine consumption. The findings will be applied to develop an epidemiological model to simulate how the implementation of different interventions would affect health inequalities in Europe.
Objective
Addressing social inequality in diet and health is a major public health challenge; the socially disadvantaged have the poorest diets and die the youngest. A further cause for concern is that commonly adopted public health interventions may be inadvertently worsening social inequalities in diet. We therefore need to identify interventions that benefit all, but are particularly effective in improving the diet of the disadvantaged, as this approach will reduce inequality and be the most effective way of improving overall population health. By testing a novel psychological theory, across two work packages (WPs) I will establish the type of population level interventions that worsen social inequalities in diet and identify interventions that not only improve the diet of the overall population, but also reduce inequality. WP1 will test the new hypothesis that the social patterning of executive function results in information-based nutrition interventions benefitting the socially advantaged but failing the disadvantaged, whilst structural interventions benefit all and also reduce social inequalities in diet. In WP1 I will use newly developed immersive digital reality methods to study dietary choice and laboratory feeding paradigms to examine dietary consumption in the socially advantaged vs. disadvantaged, before conducting the first ever large scale randomized control trial to identify how the real-world implementation of information vs. structural interventions affect social inequalities in diet. WP2 will exploit the knowledge generated in WP1 in order to develop a state of the art epidemiological model to simulate how the implementation of different information vs. structural nutrition policy interventions would affect population level health and health inequalities in Europe. By using inter-disciplinary methods this project will identify nutrition intervention approaches that can be used to improve population health and reduce social inequality.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
L69 7ZX Liverpool
United Kingdom