Research Synopsis
My Food and Nutrition Policy for Population Health research program provides an evidence base to support public health nutrition policy in areas such as health claims on foods, front-of-pack labelling, children's marketing on foods, nutritional quality of packaged and restaurant foods, menu labelling, food fortification, food-like natural health products, trans fat, sodium, and sugar. Research approaches include: (i) consumer surveys on knowledge, attitudes and behaviours related to foods and nutrition; (ii) assessments of the nutritional quality of Canadian foods; (iii) the development and evaluation of mobile apps to motivate and enable consumers to improve their dietary intakes; and, (iv) the development of methods for assessing and modelling population intakes, using national food consumption surveys. My group has developed two large national food databases, which have been used to answer a number of policy related research questions, and also serve as the basis of our consumer apps.