Special aspects in nutritional behaviour research

Working with consumer-oriented issues of social and nutritional sciences as well as home economics while taking the impact of societal and technical developments on nutritional behaviour into account

The research area “Special aspects in nutritional behaviour research” addresses issues in social and nutritional science as well as home economics with a focus on the consumer. The work is accompanied by an interest in understanding determinants of everyday nutritional behaviour. Two thematic strands can be distinguished.

The first strand comprises measures intended to improve the energy balance and nutrient supply of the population, and are thus closely linked to the National Reduction and Innovation Strategy (NRI). These include:

• investigating how the sugar, fat, and salt contents of processed foods on the German market are changing over time (national product monitoring)
• the large-scale automation of the monitoring of processed foods with the use of artificial intelligence (project RePro)
• the integration of data from the national product monitoring with a Europe-wide database on the composition of processed foods (EU Joint Action Best ReMaP)
• the surveillance of measures in Europe and worldwide which aim to reduce population intakes of sugar, fat and salt (e.g. front-of-pack nutrition labelling or the regulation of food marketing to children).

The second thematic strand addresses current social and technical developments in their interplay with nutritional behaviour. Amongst others, this includes the growing interest in plant-based nutrition, the increasing digitalisation in many nutrition-related areas as well as the impact the corona pandemic has had on diet and body weight.