PhD Opportunities within our School

Posted 15/11/2024

Dietary optimization to improve nutritional adequacy, environmental impact and cost. What are the minimum changes that are required?

Background

The environmental impact of food production is key area in transitioning to more sustainable food systems. However, sustainable diets should also be healthy and nutritious, and balancing these factors is critical. On a product basis, this is typically done in so-called nutritional life cycle assessments (nLCA), wherein both nutritional quality and environmental impact are considered. However, products are never one-on-one replacements and product replacements in diets can lead to (micro)nutrient deficiencies.

Hence, sustainability of foods cannot (only) be considered on a product basis but needs to be considered on a whole diet basis. Doing this requires sustainable diets modeling, whereby both nutrient provision and environmental impact of food items in a diet are considered and diet optimization is done with the constraints of needing to meet nutrient requirements while minimizing environmental impact. Approaches using optimization by linear programming approaches have been shown to be highly suitable for this and tools to do this have recently become available. Using this approach, the impact of dietary shifts or inclusion or removal of specific nutritional/food constraints can be identified.

Aim

In this PhD project, sustainable diets will be studies using an optimization tool to identify what changes could be made to diets to make them nutrient adequate, subject to constraints on environmental impact, price, and change from current diet. The model works with population data and provides information about population-level changes. The model will search for nutrient adequate diets while either minimizing change from current diet, emissions, or price, with additional options for hard limits on emissions and price.

Within this project the following specific aims are foreseen:

• Creating one or more country-specific datasets for inclusion in the model based on available data
• Exploring the influence of including constraints on protein quality on diet outcomes
• Exploring the influence of including bioavailability of specific nutrients on diet outcomes
• Exploring the influence of inclusion or exclusion of specific food products or food groups on diet outcomes
• Exploring the impact of supplementation of diets or fortification of foods on diet outcomes

In all cases, diet outcomes will include both nutrition across population groups, environmental impact and economic aspects of diets.

The position

The position is a 48 month fully-funded PhD (tax-free stipend of €25,000 per year and fees) which will be based at the School of Food and Nutritional Sciences in University College Cork under the supervision of Prof. Thom Huppertz and Dr. Miriam Clegg. The project is funded by the Dutch Dairy Association (NZO) in collaboration with the Sustainable Nutrition Initiative (https://sustainablenutritioninitiative.com/).

Requirements

The minimum requirement is an upper second-class BSc in a related science degree such as nutrition or food science. An MSc in a relevant area would be advantageous. Affinity for data analysis and mathematical modeling are required, as well as good skills on reviewing literature, attention to detail, time-management, organisation, teamwork and independent learning. A minimum International English Language Testing System (IELTS) score of 6.5 overall and 6.0 for individual skills (or equivalent) is required.

To apply, please access and complete the application form using the link by the 13^th December 2024