Studying interactions between nutrition, health, and sustainability
Project Leader: Dr Adam Briggs, Academic Clinical Fellow
Adam’s research at Oxford focuses on health, nutrition, and sustainability. His initial work investigated the potential impact on chronic disease of a UK tax based on foods’ greenhouse gas emissions. The research used a variety of routine data sources to inform a comparative risk assessment model based in Excel. Adam and his colleagues aimed to see whether health and sustainability goals align, and presented the work as a poster at the Public Health Science conference hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine, with the Lancet publishing the abstract. The full paper is currently under review.
Related work which Adam is doing focuses on modelling the impact on obesity of a tax on sugar-sweetened drinks. Adam and his colleagues were commissioned by the Minister for Health from the Irish government to model a 10% tax. This informed a health impact assessment and will be published soon. The same work based on UK data is currently being prepared for publication.
Over the coming months Adam will be working with cohort data from the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer to look at the long-term health outcomes of different diets.
January 2013
