Nutrition, Physical Activity, & Obesity

Evidence suggests that sugar sweetened beverage consumption is positively associated with or influences whether children have obesity. To assess the combined effectiveness of including both taxes and warning labels on sugar-sweetened beverages to reduce parents' purchases, RTI is conducting a discrete choice experiment with funding from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Healthy Eating Research Program. The study will examine the impact of these initiatives across low- and high-income, Black, Latinx, and White parents. 

RTI collaborated with the University of Malawi to carry out a study to identify and explain predictors of dietary intake and food choice among Malawian mother–child dyads with an overweight mother, child, or both. The study had a longitudinal mixed-methods design that included measurement of anthropometry, surveys, observations, and qualitative data collection. Cost, taste, and food quality were the most important drivers of women’s food purchasing choices. Food group consumption was largely driven by maternal food preferences, household economic status, and household food security.

RTI International and Cornell University’s Division of Nutritional Sciences are serving as the Research Coordinating Center for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund’s Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH) study, powered by the All of Us Research Program. The NPH program will build on recent advances in biomedical science including artificial intelligence (AI), microbiome research, as well as the infrastructure and large, diverse participant cohort of the All of Us Research Program. These advances provide unprecedented opportunities to generate new data to provide insight into personalized nutrition also referred to as precision nutrition. 

RTI is conducting mixed methods quasi-experimental evaluations of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition’s project to transform food systems to improve diet quality and resilience for the most vulnerable in Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda. The interventions are designed to improve accessibility, affordability, and safety of specific nutritious foods, coupled with behavior change communication, to shift norms and increase desirability of the foods among low-income consumers. The evaluations are guided by the RE-AIM (reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, maintenance) framework. They include population-based individual-level surveys and market actor surveys to measure program impacts and qualitative and observations methods, which contribute to the process evaluation and program impact pathway analysis.