A new research network will investigate why people in low- and middle-income countries eat poorly and move too little, and test ways to change that. Non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancers now kill more people in developing nations than infectious diseases do. Yet most research on diet and physical activity has focused on wealthy countries, leaving policymakers in Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia without evidence tailored to their populations. This project fills that gap by building a network of researchers from the University of Cambridge and partner institutions in Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa, Jamaica, Brazil, Peru, India, and Fiji. If successful, the network will produce concrete data on what drives unhealthy diets and sedentary behaviour in these settings—things like food availability, transport infrastructure, and urban design. It will then design and evaluate interventions, from school programmes to street redesigns, and feed results directly to national health ministries. The goal is to shift population-level patterns of diet and activity, reducing the long-term burden of chronic disease without requiring expensive medical treatments that many countries cannot afford.
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Alignment with the Strategic Objectives of the Cambridge University. Cambridge University is committed to pursuing excellence in research to address the health needs of populations in low and middle income countries (LMICs), and doing so through equitable partnerships. Examples include the Cambridge-Africa programme [1], Training Health Researchers in Vocational Excellence [2], and the Wellcome Trust-Cambridge Centre for Global Health Research [3]. This proposal builds on this commitment, and would substantially enhance Cambridge’s ability to contribute to research and capacity building for the prevention of NCDs in LMICs. Institutional Strengths and Partnerships The proposed Global Diet and Activity Research (GDAR) Group and Network will build on the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) which is internationally recognised for its research in the UK on: population-level determinants of diet and physical activity; evaluation of natural experiments and planned interventions; and the use of public health modelling to estimate the long-term health effects of changes in determinants. The work of the Centre is transdisciplinary with social and behavioural sciences, economics, geographical information science, epidemiology and biostatistics. It has 6 main research groups [4], and includes a strong knowledge exchange strategy with pathways to impact through links with national policy makers. It has developed to a stage where it is ready to broaden its focus to LMICs. CEDAR is part of the MRC Epidemiology Unit, which is globally recognised for its work on the genetic, developmental and environmental determinants of obesity, type 2 diabetes and related metabolic disorders [5]. Unit strengths include objective and subjective assessment of physical activity and diet. This, together with the newly established platform for measuring diet, nutrition and physical activity in the NIHR funded Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) [6], will support the proposed GDAR Group and Network in robust and feasible approaches to diet and physical activity assessment in LMICs. As described in the section on collaborations and partnerships, this proposal builds on a growing portfolio of studies on the determinants of diet and physical activity in LMICs. This includes two recently funded Foundation Awards from the MRC Global Challenges Research Fund, one of which is concerned with the determinants of diet and the other with physical activity and active transport. This proposal builds on two broad groups of institutional partnerships. We will establish the Network by consolidating current partnerships with institutions in Africa (i.e. University of Yaounde, Kenyan Medical Research Institute, University of Witwatersrand, University of Cape Town) and in the Caribbean (i.e. University of the West Indies, headquarters in Jamaica and serving 10 LMICs). In the second year after the Network is established, additional partnerships will be developed extending the geographical scope of the Network. This will involve institutions who are collaborators on the Foundation Awards referred to above: University of Sao Paolo, Brazil; Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Peru; Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; and the University of the South Pacific, Fiji. In addition, we will develop a partnership with the Indian Diabetes Research Foundation, Chennai, with which the MRC Epidemiology Unit has previous collaborations. Goal, Aims, Proposed Work Programme. The goal of GDAR is to support sustainable development and the prevention of NCDs in LMICs by establishing a research Network that will investigate the determinants of diet and physical activity, develop and evaluate interventions and inform policy. In pursuit of this goal, we will: 1. Build on the expertise of CEDAR and the MRC Epidemiology Unit to create a GDAR Group 2. Consolidate collaborations with institutions in Africa and the Caribbean to establish a GDAR Network 3.
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