A Toolkit for Integrating Nutrition into Research

Workshop on nutrition data in research

December 15-16, 2022: the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health – India Research Center hosted a workshop titled ‘A Toolkit for Integrating Nutrition into Research‘ in Mumbai with Dr Shilpa Bhupathiraju, assistant professor of nutrition at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. The workshop aimed to address the gap in the collection and usage of nutritional data within population-based research by exploring various methods and best practices. Particularly, it covered models and methods of measuring nutrition data, including diet and energy, nutrition biomarkers, dietary patterns, issues in analysis and presentation, precision nutrition, and practical application of critiquing nutrition science. The two-day workshop was attended by 25 participants with backgrounds in research, nutrition, public health, and medicine, with a goal of learning how to use and read nutrition data appropriately.

The workshop was updated and conducted again in April 2024 at the IRC, and attended by 30 participants.

About the faculty

Dr Shilpa Bhupathiraju, PhD, MS, assistant professor of nutrition, Harvard Chan School, and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on the dietary and lifestyle determinants of cardiometabolic diseases using omic technologies. She has a special interest in examining this in high-risk groups such as South Asians.

Dr Bhupathiraju is the principal investigator of several grants including an NIH grant to examine saliva and plasma metabolomic signatures of diabetes progression in Hispanic adults. She recently completed a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant where she used data from the India Migration Study and the Andhra Pradesh Children and Parents Study to develop a global diet quality index that can capture the risk of undernutrition and chronic disease.

Objectives

At the conclusion of the workshop, participants were better equipped to:

• Describe the utility and limitations of different epidemiological study designs for research in nutritional epidemiology.
• Describe the strengths and limitations of different methods of measuring diet and identify when specific dietary methods may be most appropriate.
• Explain the statistical methods commonly used in nutritional epidemiology to analyze diet-disease associations.
• Describe strategies that can be used to evaluate or adjust for other dietary and lifestyle factors that may explain or influence relationships of diet and disease.

Workshop structure