Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Professor Emma Boyland will introduce the latest evidence of young people’s exposure to unhealthy food marketing, the powerful techniques used to persuade, and the impact on eating and related behaviours. This will include recognition of the growth of digital platforms and the increasingly personalised and immersive marketing this facilitates.
Concerns have been raised about young people’s vulnerabilities to this type of marketing given their enthusiastic uptake of digital media and their immature cognitive ability, given that marketing that is strongly embedded in entertainment content is particularly challenging to identify. This session will also provide a critical overview of methodological developments and current and future policy options to regulate in this space.
The Obesity Institute at Leeds Beckett University brings together academics from a range of disciplines across the university with policy makers, practitioners, and people living with or at risk of obesity and their families and carers, to coproduce innovative person-centred advances in obesity locally, nationally and internationally.
Professor Emma Boyland is a Professor of Food Marketing and Child Health based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, where she is Research Lead for the Department and leads the Appetite and Obesity Research group. As an experimental psychologist, her work principally focuses on the food environment, characterising the foods and beverages available, how they are marketed, and how this impacts on eating behaviours (particularly in children).
She has extensive experience of knowledge exchange and translation, supporting use of evidence to inform policy progress in the UK and internationally. She also co-leads the Liverpool Obesity Research Network (a research network of obesity units and research laboratories based across the University of Liverpool, University Hospital Aintree and Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen Hospital Trusts).
Emma is an established global leader in her research field and has authored over 115 peer-reviewed journal articles to date, as well as multiple World Health Organization (WHO) reports and book chapters. Prof Boyland has received more than £4 million in research funding to her institution, from funders including the National Institute of Health Research, the MRC, ESRC, the Wellcome Trust, WHO, and Cancer Research UK.
