Healthy Eating and Sustainable Diets
Dr. Lindsey Smith Taillie, Associate Professor, Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health
Thursday, March 28 from 6:00 – 7:30PM – This event has ended.
Everybody eats. But how do we eat well, in a way that tastes good, keeps us healthy, and helps protect the planet? In this session, we will cover the current state of what we are eating in the US and globally. We’ll talk about how current diets are contributing to chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as well as how what we eat (and what we waste) contributes to climate change. We’ll take a high-level perspective, with snapshots from around the globe, to uncover the ways in which our “toxic food environment” is making us sick. We’ll dispel the myth that poor diets are due to the lack of willpower or education and showcase promising solutions using snapshots of successful food policies from around the globe.
In the second part of the talk, we’ll delve into specific tools and tricks we can use to make healthier, more sustainable food choices, in the context of our modern food environment. We’ll draw on strategies from nutrition, public health, psychology, mass communication, and behavioral economics. For example, we’ll talk about how to avoid misleading marketing claims on foods, and how to prevent food waste. Learners will leave feeling empowered to make healthier, more sustainable food choices. Join us for an informative and interactive session!
Lindsey Smith Taillie, PhD, is a nutrition epidemiologist whose work focuses on designing and evaluating food policies to support healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable diets across the globe. She uses datasets on the food supply, food marketing, food prices, purchases, and dietary intake to evaluate the impact of a variety of laws, including sugary drinks and ultra processed foods taxes, restrictions on unhealthy food marketing to kids, food assistance programs, and front-of-package food labels. Dr. Taillie is co-director of the Global Food Research Program, and currently co-leads a large multi-country project to inform and evaluate an array of healthy food policies around the world, with a major focus in Latin America, including Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Mexico.
Dr. Taillie also leads research using controlled experiments to inform policy design. She co-created the UNC Mini Mart, an experimental store located at the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention that looks and feels like a real convenience store. She also created Lola’s, an experimental online supermarket, and uses these stores to test the impact of an array of policies on consumer food purchasing behavior. Much of this work focuses on designing policies to promote health equity in historically underserved communities, using a community-engaged approach to inform research design and dissemination.
A third focus for Dr. Taillie is in using policies and interventions to promote more sustainable diets. She is currently leading an EPA-funded grant to develop interventions to prevent household food waste as a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Dr. Taillie is also leading an NIH-sponsored workgroup with the goal of developing a framework to understand dietary patterns and consumer choice in the context of climate and environmental change.