Population nutrition research at the frontiers: an examination of recent literature (384.1)

Abstract

The profound health, social and economic consequences of nutrition problems, and their multisectoral causes and solutions, creates a need for broadened research agendas at multiple scales to complement research on the biology and behavior of individuals that has been the foundation of nutritional sciences. A recent paper identified several dimensions for the frontiers of population nutrition research and suggested that research is already moving in these directions. These dimensions relate to why, what, who and how we study and the disciplinary foundations for this research. This paper reports on a systematic examination of recent literature to quantify research in relation to these dimensions. We examined 968 papers published in 2012 from 6 nutrition journals, 4 public health journals and 3 food policy journals. Each paper was coded on the presence or absence of Mode 2 (frontier) characteristics as defined in previous work. Mode 2 characteristics were identified in 7% of the 762 papers from the nutrition journals, 36% of the 77 food/nutrition papers in the public health journals and 100% of the 129 food/nutrition papers in the food policy journals. Of the Mode 2 papers in nutrition and public health journals, 70‐80% had a focus on broad topics such as national policy, workforce development, programs, schools and global issues and 30‐40% met each of the other Mode 2 criteria such as the actor focus (other than consumer), non‐traditional methods and engaged or participatory approaches. These data indicate that Mode 2 food/nutrition research is fairly common in public health and food policy journals but is a relatively small proportion of papers in nutrition journals. The increasing societal attention to nutrition creates opportunities for greatly expanding Mode 2 population nutrition research.