Summary
Our current understanding of the relationship between diet and the development of non-communicable disease (NCD) is limited by a number of factors. These include a lack of understanding of dietary mechanisms that drive NCD, inaccurate tools to collect dietary information, a nascent understanding of the role of personalised nutrition, and the lack of data in vulnerable groups where NCDs are often over-represented. The overarching aim of CoDiet is to develop a series of tools (through eight work packages) which will address the current gaps in our knowledge and lead to the development of a tool that will assess dietary-induced NCD risk.
We will achieve this through the six objectives which will answer the challenges of the work programme
- Development of AI-driven literature searching tools - bring clear understanding of large global literature in the field of physiological and metabolic links between diet and NCD
- Enhance the understanding of NCD risk factors - we will bring a series of beyond the state of the technics to gain mechanistic insight
- Understanding of the importance individual variation in response to diet to risk of NCD - this will give insight into the targeting of dietary NCD advice
- Develop an enhanced method of dietary assessment using machine learning technologies – solving a fundamental problem in nutrition of lack of an accurate dietary tool
- Develop an enhance diet-NCD monitoring tool - enabling change in NCD in response to diet to be monitored at the population level
- Develop a dynamic interface between diet and NCD risk factor monitoring and policy - Ensuring CoDiet is applicable at a population level
The investigation of these objectives and the answers they provide will open a pathway to enhancing the uptake of NCD protective diet at a population level.
CHEPI's involvement
CHEPI will lead WP6 of Co-Diet. WP6 is designed to translate the knowledge generated in the project into policy developments aimed at improving diets in EU countries. It will do so by assessing the state of diet and nutrition policies in a meaningful selection of EU countries, building on previous policy benchmarking work, and evaluating the potential impacts of policy developments incorporating project findings generated, in particular, in WP 2, 5 and 6. WP6 will (a) analyse policies to improve diets in six EU countries and develop new policy scenarios; (b) expand on ICL’s Health-GPS model’s ability to capture the impact of diet on the incidence of chronic diseases; and (c) simulate the impacts of the policy scenarios identified in (a).