SONYA’s PhD candidate, Celia Burgaz, presented her research at the International Congress on Obesity in Australia.

Celia Burgaz is a PhD candidate at SONYA, in collaboration with Sciensano, the Belgian public health institute. Celia presented her research on sustainable food systems at the International Congress on Obesity (#ICO2022) that took place in Melbourne from the 18th to the 22nd of October.

Her research is part of the INFORMAS 2.0 project, which focuses on creating harmonised indicators for measuring progress toward more environmentally sustainable, healthier food systems.

At #ICO2022, Celia participated with two oral presentations and one poster, all of them part of her PhD thesis. Across her interventions, Celia explained the current global challenges to sustainable food systems and proposed solutions to policy-makers. Moreover, she highlighted which are the main gaps in the literature for researchers.

The main take-home message for governments was to take courage, as progress on sustainable food systems is achievable with cross-government actions. Priority should be given to policies and interventions that have shown to be effective for multiple outcomes – therefore, those with double and triple duty potential (such as taxes on sugary drinks, school nutrition programmes or food labelling).

Future research in this area should focus on interventions that are perceived to have double or triple duty potential but have not been analysed in depth yet (such as food waste prevention strategies or fiscal measures in red/processed meat). Furthermore, trade-offs should be taken into account to propose better evidence-based solutions.