Healthy diets and sustainable food systems – what is it and how do we get there?

A PhD workshop with lectures and discussions on how to understand, measure, and achieve healthy and sustainable diets and food systems within the framework of the United Nations 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals.

Description

What we eat affects our health as well as the environment. While we live longer, not only undernourishment but also malnourishment and overweight threaten good health and wellbeing. Furthermore, overconsumption of unhealthy food is increasing while the access to healthy food and clean drinking water depends of people’s wallets. At the same time, the global food production is straining the environmental systems that we depend on, with the result that food production is one of the largest drivers of global environmental change that in turn contribute to climate change. How can we achieve healthy diets and sustainable transformations of the ways we produce, process, distribute, and consume food? How can we reduce the environmental degradation caused by food production while also making sure that what we eat makes us healthy?

This PhD workshop will deal with these questions of how food production and consumption affect our health, and relate them to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We tackle these questions from an integrated view, discussing both healthy diets and system related issues which set the boundaries for what can be achieved in practice. The aim is to engage doctoral students, both from medicine and other disciplines, in reflecting and discussing the following questions:

• What is a healthy and environmentally sustainable diet?
• How do we measure what is a healthy and sustainable diet?
• How can we achieve healthy and sustainable diets for all?

The participants should after the workshop have gained an insight into these questions as well as developed an understanding of the basic skills required in order to set up indicators and measure healthy and sustainable diets. The participants should also have gained a basic understanding of system thinking and how it can be used to develop solutions to the challenges we face in sustainable food systems and healthy diets.

Target-Group/Eligible participants

PhD students who are interested in issues of healthy diets, food systems and sustainability, and who are enrolled at any of the EUGLOH universities, are eligible. The aim is to attract an interdisciplinary group of students allowing for a wide range of different perspective on the topics being discussed.

Recruitment of participants

The selection of workshop participants will be on a first-come-first basis, with registration for currently enrolled PhD students from the EUGLOH alliance partner universities. There will be a small preparation package of articles sent out prior to the workshop.

Recognition

Certificate

Language

English

Number of participants

30