Food & Health Alliance

These are some of the questions that the internationally famous Rowett Institute, part of the University of Aberdeen, will be seeking to answer as part of a new five-year programme, entitled Healthy, safe diets, initiated and funded by the Scottish Government.

The contribution of the Rowett – one of the key UK centres for the study of food and its relationship to long-term health – will involve a range of work programmes, all aimed at finding practical ways to improve the health and diet of the Scottish population.

One central element will be a strong emphasis on behavioural, social science work seeking to answer that age-old question: why is it people don’t do as they say when it comes to eating?

As research leader Dr Julia Allan notes, much public health work is based on the assumption that telling people what they should do and why will persuade people to change their behaviour. 

“Unfortunately, psychological studies have repeatedly demonstrated that while almost everyone reports intending to change their behaviour after receiving information, only a minority do so.  So it’s crucial to identify why people fail to act so that we can design health interventions that go beyond information provision and help people to act on the information provided.” 

Dietary behaviour is particularly difficult to change, she says, because changes typically involve short-term costs in return for long-term benefits.  “People are very driven by the immediate consequences of an action so the short-term cost will have a much more powerful effect on behaviour than a benefit that is far off in time – for instance, the immediate pleasure of eating cake usually vastly outweighs the fuzzy, far-off health benefit that will accrue from repeatedly not eating cake.”

The research study will use activity monitors, computerised diaries and GPS to follow people with healthy intentions as they go about their everyday lives. This information will then be used to build up a detailed picture of what it is that trigger episodes of ‘unintentional’ unhealthy eating and sedentary behaviour.

The Rowett will also be working closely with the food industry to examine ways in which different brands of food can be reformulated to make them healthier – and, just as important, increase satiety and so counter obesity.

In recent years the institute has successfully worked with Marks and Spencer to produce its Simply Fuller Longer calorie-counted meal range that helps induce feelings of satiety. It was also involved in developing a new bread, now available in Asda bakeries, that helps control diabetes through diet.

“We will be feeding outputs from the research to the Food and Health Innovation Service with the aim of making changes to food products,” says Knowledge Exchange Manager Sue Bird. “And we will be making sure we join up with all the new initiatives from the food industry.”

One of the central goals is of course a food solution for obesity. As Sue points out, drugs and surgery are never going to work for whole populations. “We need to find something more fundamental, and that takes us back to social science and the questions of what determines food choice. We need to understand the natural mechanisms of food hunger and satiety and also the links to physical activities which are clearly an important component.”

The institute will also be looking at environmental issues and what constitutes a sustainable diet. And it will be linking up with other research bodies as well as the EU to ensure that learning is shared and that any innovations or breakthroughs in one field are disseminated to everyone else.

In some of these areas, such as food reformulation, she believes there is the prospect of quite rapid advances. “If industry sees something they like they can move fast on it.”

But she accepts that the pace of change will be slower when it comes to influencing behaviour. “There are no short cuts – if there were we would have found them by now. But by integrating all our work there is real hope of progress.”

More information available at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/rowett

Contact: Dr Sue Bird, sue.bird@abdn.ac.uk