Behavioral Nutrition

Catalog description

The world is experiencing a nutrition transition as an increasing number of countries rise from poverty. Globally, chronic disease rates continue to increase while rates of undernutrition, including micronutrient deficiencies, stunting, and wasting, remain persistently high. To attenuate all forms of malnutrition across contexts, we need to understand how and why people make choices about the foods they eat so that effective, theory-based interventions can be designed to improve diet and reduce malnutrition risk. This course in behavioral nutrition investigates the bidirectional relationship between eating behaviors and nutrition, with particular emphasis on developing theoretical foundations for how research is conducted and disseminated in this discipline. This course will build an awareness of the many social, environmental, and individual differences that influence the brain and related eating behaviors. At the end of this course, students will be able to recognize and identify the foundational principles of behavioral nutrition and apply these to the design of scientific experiments. They will also be able to apply the principles learned in this course to the design of interventions and programs to change nutrition behaviors.