The aim of the seminar on risk and resources within the context of nutrition is to discuss and analyze public health and social scientific aspects of our food culture and the way we eat.
To be central within the seminar are the societal influences on our food culture. We will look for answers on questions such as: Why do men eat differently than women? How do our cultural heritage and our socio-economic status influence what we like to eat and how we like to eat it? How do parenting, religion, moral, tradition, media, peer groups, economics, agricultural and social policies, institutions like nurseries, kindergartens, schools, universities, workplaces, the food industry, technological, economical and biochemical developments and inventions influence our nutrition and our food culture? How is our food produced? What are the ecological and sanitary dangers resulting from large scale food production? Why do we witness abundance and scarcity on our planet at the same time? What can be done to defeat world hunger and how can we sustain food safety for a growing world population without depredating our natural resources?

This course will cover the development of theory- and evidence-based interventions in public health. Public Health has seen tremendous successes over the last 150 years, but there remains considerable room for the development of more effective interventions. Evidence-based practice has been suggested to overcome limitations of previous approaches to intervention development, in particular through the integration of scientific evidence and practice on all levels of intervention development. The key components of evidence-based public health include decision-making based on the best available evidence, and using appropriate data together with engaging the community in the decision-making process.
In this course, will utilise current frameworks for intervention development such as Intervention Mapping and the Bahaviour Change Wheel framework to guide the steps of developing evidence-based interventions to change health and health behaviours. This will require reading English literature and engaging in some bouts of data collection.