Behavioural Interventions to Improve the Quality of the Grocery Shopping

Carmen is a Public Health Nutrition scientist at the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences (University of Oxford). Her principal research interests lie in the prevention and management of non-communicable chronic disease through dietary improvements, in particular, obesity and cardiovascular disease.

Diet is an important determinant of health, and food purchasing is a key antecedent to consumption hence improving the nutritional quality of food purchases presents a clear opportunity to intervene. She has been involved in a recent systematic review of interventions implemented in grocery stores which suggested that price manipulations, healthier swap suggestions, and perhaps manipulations to item availability change food purchasing and could play a role in public health strategies to improve health. However, the evidence base for interventions in grocery stores or at the individual level is still very limited.
She is currently working on a range of studies aiming to examine the effectiveness of interventions based around healthier swaps on the quality of the food purchased and eaten as well as the short term effects on relevant health outcomes. She has recently conducted a complex behavioural intervention based in primary care to improve diet quality among patients with high cholesterol (PC-SHOP study). The intervention consisted of health professional (HP) advice alone, or in combination with personalised feedback based on the nutritional analysis of grocery store loyalty card data from one of the largest UK supermarkets. Overall her research aims to develop and test simpler and inexpensive ways to help people improve diet and prevent cardiovascular disease and obesity.
This evening lecture is given in conjunction with the Introduction to Study Design and Research Methods accredited short course, part of the Evidence-Based Healthcare programme at the University of Oxford's Department for Continuing Education.

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