i3food: Information, Interventions and Inequalities in the UK food system

每天，英国都有一个由零售商、制造商、餐饮公司、运输商、农民、海关官员、环境卫生官员、科技公司和其他许多人组成的网络为英国提供食物。这种食物系统非常复杂，但并不能提供最佳的结果--英国的饮食往往富含饱和脂肪、盐和糖，水果和蔬菜含量较低，并与不可持续的环境破坏程度有关。在英国，获得食物的机会并不平等，更多的弱势群体更不可能实现健康、可持续的饮食。这种微妙的平衡系统可能会被新技术(例如外卖服务应用程序)打破，这些技术在短时间内给购买带来巨大变化。从远处看，英国的食品体系就像一条平静的河流，蜿蜒在全国各地，但仔细看，它是一个动荡、不断变化的漩涡。这个新的研究人员联盟将进行多学科研究，旨在捕捉大漩涡的动力，了解湍流并改变河流的流向，以便食物系统被引导到健康和可持续的结果，为英国各地的每个群体。要了解食物系统，你必须了解与之互动的人的动机。我们将与食品行业、公共卫生政策制定者和弱势群体公众建立强有力的联系。这将确保我们的研究集中在食品体系可能发生的变化上，这些变化有可能大规模实施。现代消费者希望能够轻松获得食品服务，并获得做出明智购买决定所需的信息。这导致了大量关于食品系统的数据在网上免费提供(例如，超市和快餐直销网站、食品递送服务应用程序)。与此同时，零售商收集食品购买数据，为其营销策略提供参考。我们将收集这些数据，以构建一幅不断更新的食品体系图景，包括全国各地的食品体系是如何变化的，以及不同社会群体的食品购买行为是如何变化的。我们将使用这些数据来监测食品体系的变化如何影响全国不同地区和不同社会群体的消费者购买决定。这些变化可能是由“系统冲击”造成的，比如伴随着“无法达成协议”的英国退欧可能性而来的英镑贬值。或者，这可能是由于新政策的实施，比如对批量价格促销的监管(例如，买一送一)。在公众代表的指导下，我们将开发新的工具，帮助消费者做出健康、可持续的食品购买决定，例如一款智能手机应用程序，允许人们监控他们购物篮子的营养质量和环境足迹。在对目标群体进行用户测试后，我们将使用实验研究来测试工具的有效性。此外，我们将与食品行业合作伙伴共同努力，改变零售食品环境，例如将健康和可持续发展的食品的位置改为商店内的核心销售区。我们将使用商店销售数据来衡量这些变化对食品购买行为的影响。我们收集的数据和这些研究的结果将为食品体系的模型提供信息，使我们深入了解什么将对健康、不平等和医疗成本产生持久的积极影响，以及食品体系的哪些关键领域可能在整个食品体系中引发重大影响。我们将通过举办公众参与活动，如学校参观、酒吧讲座、科学会议摊位和购物中心活动，将结果反馈给公众。我们还将确保将我们收集的新颖数据集提供给英国学术界，以加强英国各地的公共卫生研究。

Every day, the UK is fed by a network of retailers, manufacturers, caterers, transporters, farmers, customs officials, environmental health officers, tech companies and many others. This food system is highly complex but does not provide optimal results - diets in the UK are often high in saturated fat, salt and sugar, low in fruit and vegetables, and are associated with unsustainable levels of environmental damage. Access to food is not equal in the UK, with more disadvantaged groups less likely to achieve healthy, sustainable diets. This finely balanced system can be disrupted by novel technologies (e.g. food delivery service apps) which create huge changes in purchasing over a short space of time. From a distance, the UK food system resembles a calm river threading its way around the country, but viewed closely it is a turbulent, ever-changing maelstrom. This new consortium of researchers will conduct multidisciplinary research aimed at capturing the dynamism of the maelstrom, understanding the turbulence and redirecting the flow of the river so that the food system is channelled towards healthy and sustainable outcomes for every group across Britain. To understand the food system you must understand the motivations of the people who interact with it. We will develop strong links with the food industry, public health policymakers and members of the public from disadvantaged groups. This will ensure that our research is focussed on plausible changes to the food system that have the potential to be implemented at scale.The modern consumer expects easy access to food services and to the information required to make informed purchasing decisions. This has led to abundance of data about the food system being made freely available online (e.g. supermarket and fast food outlet websites, food delivery service apps). Meanwhile, data on food purchases are collected by retailers to inform their marketing strategies. We will harvest these data to build a constantly updating picture of the food system, including how that food system varies around the country and how food purchasing behaviour differs for different social groups. We will use these data to monitor how changes in the food system affect consumer purchasing decisions in different parts of the country and in different social groups. These changes may be due to 'system shocks', such as the fall in the value of the pound that has accompanied the possibility of a 'no deal' Brexit. Or they may be due to implementation of new policies, such as the regulation of volume-based price promotions (e.g. Buy One Get One Free).With guidance from representatives of the public we will develop new tools to help consumers make healthy, sustainable food purchasing decisions, such as a smartphone app to allow people to monitor the nutritional quality and the environmental footprint of their shopping basket. After user testing with targeted groups, we will test the effectiveness of the tools using experimental studies. Alongside this, we will work with food industry partners to develop changes in the retail food environment, such as changing the position of healthy and sustainable foods to core selling areas within the shop. We will measure the effect of these changes on food purchasing behaviour using store sales data.The data we collect and the results of these studies will inform models of the food system which will give us insight into what will have a lasting positive impact on health, inequalities and health care costs, and where are the critical areas of the food system that can trigger large impacts throughout the food system. We will feed our results back to the public, by running public engagement events such as school visits, pub talks, stalls at science conferences and shopping centre engagements. We will also ensure that the novel datasets that we collect are made available to the UK academic community, to strengthen public health research throughout the UK.