Real-World Food Choice and Children's Dietary Health

This PhD project takes a real-world approach to explore children's food choices within the school setting. By examining high-quality, large-scale data, this work will provide valuable insights into children's food selection patterns and how children choose their food - and importantly, how healthier and more sustainable choices may be supported. Improving children's dietary intake is critical to addressing childhood obesity, a public health priority – and central to this challenge is understanding the mechanisms underpinning children's food choice. The research will generate new knowledge and understanding about children's food choice parameters, with findings having the potential to inform policy and practice in school food provision, both in the UK and internationally, with practical implications for food service providers. The increasing use of digital pre-order platforms presents a timely opportunity to capture detailed food choice data at scale – and this research will lay the ground for future interventions, focused on how children engage with such platforms. This work will also provide valuable knowledge on the methodological approaches relevant to large food choice datasets. This is a non-funded PhD position, but students can apply for funding separately. In addition to the tuition fee for the programme, there will also be a bench fee of £3,000 per year for this project. The project is based at the School of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Leeds.