Cross-cultural research
In the NBU we try to unpick the mechanisms and principles that govern human dietary behaviour. However, there is a danger that by studying people who have been exposed only to a Western diet we might overlook important detail or, worse still, we might draw general conclusions that don’t translate to other cultures.
Recently, we have worked in three areas;
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For over 5 years Jeff Brunstrom and Peter Rogers have been working with Prof Jon Holtzman, who is a cultural anthropologist from Western Michigan University. As part of this project they have also collaborated closely with Prof Kevin Myers, who is an expert in animal dietary behaviour and is based at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Our work in Kenya was featured in the BBSRC's Food Security News. The BBSRC also produced a short film to accompany this news item. You can find out more here. Our research represents a novel interdisciplinary collaboration that fuses the comparative perspective of cultural anthropological approaches with rigorous empirical methods. With the help of Jon Holtzman we have been exploring the dietary behaviour of the Samburu. This indigenous population are semi-nomadic pastoralists who live in a remote arid area of North Central Kenya. The Samburu are interesting to us because they have been exposed to a very narrow range of foods. No ‘processed’ foods and certainly no ‘diet’ products or diet sodas! This makes them an ideal population to study because they can help us to understand the comparative effects of exposure to dietary variability and complexity in our own dietary environment (a central theme of a previous BBSRC-funded project).
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As part of her PhD research, Anca Dobrescu has also explored how parents make decisions about early feeding practices and portion size from infancy to pre-school years in both UK and Romanian participants. Her objective is to determine whether there are similarities across cultures. The research has implications for understanding cross-cultural trends in parental feeding practices and their potential role in obesity. Anca is supervised by Dani Ferriday.
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In the UK, children show a preference for fruits and vegetables that contain more calories (e.g., banana versus cucumber). Given the importance of these foods for health, Ruby (Yujia) Zhai is conducting her PhD research exploring whether this relationship extends to adults and to other cultures. Currently, we are collecting data in a range of countries, including China, the USA, and Chile. Ruby is supervised by Jeff Brunstrom.
Example publications:
- Myers, K.P., Brunstrom, J.M., Rogers, P.J., Holtzman, J.D. (2019). Portion size influences intake in Samburu Kenyan people not exposed to the Western obesogenic environment. Appetite, vol 133, pp212-216. Click here to view
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Brunstrom, J.M., Rogers, P.J., Myers, K.P., Holtzman, J.D. (2015) In search of flavour-nutrient learning. A study of the Samburu pastoralists of North-Central Kenya. Appetite, vol. 91, pp. 415-425 Click here to view