Our Vision
Poor diet has a dramatic impact on the prevalence of non-communicable diseases. The UK is recognised for its strength in research relating to social and psychological drivers of dietary behaviour, and this has considerable potential to be applied by the food industry to deliver population-wide benefits. However, academic studies are often conducted in a university laboratory and often using unrepresentative samples (e.g., university students), and often researchers cannot account for changes in food preference that might occur over time.
Industry and academic researchers have a shared problem – how do we know that academic research applies in the ‘real world’?
Our vision is to develop a distributed UK-wide ‘Consumer Lab’ (a network of industry and academic members) that improves the ‘ecological validity’ of academic research by studying real-world food choices.
Our ambition is to forge academic-industry collaborations that focus on ways to assess and understand everyday dietary behaviours.
To achieve this objective, we plan to foster partnerships that incorporate novel methods of data capture, including, for example, the use of covert digital image capture, ecological momentary assessments, metabolic markers, continuous blood-glucose measurement, and wearable monitoring devices. We will also encourage the use of methods that enable dietary habits and preferences to be tracked over time, and approaches that incorporate multiple lines of evidence (e.g., supermarket loyalty-card data combined with direct observation), thereby improving the quality of evidence we can garner.
Recognising seldom heard communities, we will prioritise methods and research aimed at studying dietary behaviour in these groups, thereby enabling the food industry to address the specific needs of different populations.
