Estimating the effects of healthy eating policies (EATWELL)

The EATWELL project aims to provide the European Member States with best practice guidelines to develop appropriate policy interventions that will encourage healthy eating across Europe. In order to do this EATWELL has assessed the effectiveness of past interventions aimed at improving dietary and health outcomes.

Professor Bhavani Shankar, leader of EATWELL’s work on the quantitative estimation of diet policy effects, has assessed the effect of a range of policies implemented in Europe. In this podcast, he speaks to EUFIC about his work, sharing some of the results so far and the insights he has gained into the process of dietary policy evaluation. He also explains why the EATWELL project is important and what he hopes will be the impact of the research.

Click here for more information about the EATWELL project.

About Bhavani Shankar

Bhavani is co-principal-investigator of EATWELL and Professor of International Agriculture, Food and Health at Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research in Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) and the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy (CEDEP) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is also joint editor of Food Policy, an Elsevier journal, and a member of the Standing Panel for Impact Assessment (SPIA) for the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

He is an applied economist and his current research interests include the analysis of economic drivers of over and under nutrition, nutrition transition, dietary policy evaluation, impact assessment and the role of agriculture in enabling better nutrition and health. In the past, his research involvements have included analysis of animal disease in the Mekong region, floodplain resource management in Bangladesh and the evaluation of transgenic cotton performance in South Africa and India.