Survey and surveillance of nutrition behaviour, a developing research area

Abstract

The scientific issues Nutrition behaviour is a complex process. It is influenced by biological, psychological, socio-economic, -demographic and -cultural, as well as home-economics-related factors and is shaped by the individual situation (Gedrich 2003). Known for its potential detrimental impact on nutritional status and health, behavioural research is interested in understanding and explaining people's nutrition behaviour. However, the practical use of nutrition behaviour models for intervention programs requires besides quantitative also qualitative baseline data. Such qualitative information about the prevalence and variation of dietary habits within and across populations and subgroups thereof, are relatively scarce. This may be the result of limited interest by the more technical/natural science-oriented nutrition research community in behavioural questions, and -as a consequence or a cause -may be due to a lack of experts in the field and limited financial resources. In the present issue of "SPM: International Journal of Public Health", the editors have provided for the first time a much-needed platform for researchers in qualitative nutrition behaviour. Qualitative nutrition behaviour assessment is shown to be exploratory, i. e. descriptive, thus helping to identify and guide intervention priorities. The information gathered here highlights a large diversity of nutritional behaviours across countries, regions, and populations, which do not necessarily represent the most commonly studied ones. In particular, the articles by Rossi et al. (2005) and Kruseman et al. (2005) show the increasing importance of supporting nutrition behaviour research in countries in transition and for vulnerable population groups, such as refugees or migrants, who have left their known sociocultural environments without being able to settle completely in a new one. Only an open scientific forum and practical exchange of experts from various disciplines will allow for successful development and validation of assessment tools, their use for nutrition behaviour monitoring, and implementation of well-targeted interventions as defined by national nutrition policies. Even in non-transitional European countries much more interdisciplinary nutrition behaviour research is needed, since behaviour-related problems may (further) increase in the future (Oltersdorf 2003), as indicated by the studies about nutrition behaviours of migrants in Geneva, Switzerland (Kruseman et al. 2005), and of Finnish (Kosonen et al. 2005) and Italian (Tripodi et al. 2005) youth. Winkler and colleagues (2005) have responded to this need by presenting how an effective nutrition education initiative can be built onto the results of health monitoring data.