People Eat, We Study Them
During the last decades, involvement in food preparation and time spent cooking decreased in many western countries. At the same time, the prevalence of overweight and obesity increased both in children and adults. If the effects of the consumption of different food categories on weight gain have largely been studied, the impact of the involvement in food preparation is still not well understood.
When deepening the home cooking involvement, it becomes crucial to comprehend which are exactly the self-regulatory processes that motivate individuals to adopt and maintain healthier meal preparation and consumption habits. More than informing about dietary patterns (e.g., what people eat), this type of analysis taps into how people eat (motivational antecedents, socio-demographic and economic correlates, and effects on diet quality and health status).
The Food Behaviour Lab at CATÓLICA-LISBON, founded in 2020 to bring together different projects devoted to food consumer behaviour, research aims to uncover such patterns to promote positive change applied to healthy or sustainable eating behaviors.
The researchers in the Food Behaviour Lab have been working in food behaviour research for several years and much of their careers, throughout several different projects, including the international European project SUSINCHAIN, devoted to exploring new protein sources for food and animal feed, or the already completed PRIMEMEAL project, which explored how personal norms affect what and how people choose to eat.