Determinants of Diet

Citation.

Goal or mission statement. My overall aim is to contribute to the understanding of socio-cultural and socio-economic factors underlying dietary behaviour in order to inform the development of public health strategies to improve dietary behaviour in socially disadvantaged populations.

Research themes. My research focus is on ethnic and social inequalities in diet and diet-related chronic disease such as obesity and diabetes. My work can be described in three main themes:

Determinants of diet: I am particularly interested in factors such as culture, cultural change and socio-economic position. Much of my research has been on these factors, for example studies on socio-economic gradients in diet and their reproducibility in different ethnic groups. Understanding the role of culture and cultural change in dietary behaviour and diet quality using qualitative and quantitative methods.

Systems Approach: I am intrigued by the interaction between determinants of diet with the broader physical and social environment. Health behaviour is an outcome of interdependent factors that interact with each other at multiple levels. For example, social processes are likely to shape the behaviours of individuals (try saying no to birthday cake!); the physical environment may have different effects on the diet quality of some individuals, depending on their knowledge, financial situation etc. Understanding the mechanisms underlying these interactions is key to understanding the social patterning of dietary intake and, ultimately, chronic disease risk.

Nutritional epidemiology: Notwithstanding the above focus, I maintain an interest in the link between diet and dietary patterns with health and chronic disease. To this end I conduct research on methods to measure habitual diet (development of food frequency questionnaires, 24 hour recalls); and methods to conceptualise dietary patterns and diet quality. Recent studies have used a priori and a posteriori methods to investigate the role of diet in type 2 diabetes and depression.