PIDS · Population level interventions to improve diet and reduce social inequality

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.