Eating With Impact

'Food is the single strongest lever to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth. However, food is currently threatening both people and planet. An immense challenge facing humanity is to provide a growing world population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems.'
(EAT Lancet Commission, 2025)

While many potential behavioural drivers and barriers to the adoption of healthy diets from sustainable food systems have been identified, it is apparent that there are currently no clear-cut strategies for guaranteeing success.

Eating With Impact is a research project conducted in collaboration with young adults (aged 18-25 years) living in the Canberra region that aims to address this and strengthen our understanding of what sustainable healthy diet activities are important to young adults in our local food region and how they can be implemented effectively. This research will use a realist analytical approach to identify underlying causal mechanisms and explore how they work to produce outcomes – or not – in this specific context.

The first stage of the research project is to invite a reference group of young Canberra adults to guide the choice of sustainable healthy diet behaviour to be further examined in this research and consolidate ideas about how to encourage young adults to adopt this behaviour.

If you reside locally, are aged 18-25 years and interested in shaping the future focus of public health research, we invite you to join our team!

Click here to apply to join our local reference group!

For more information or to contact the research team please email: Allison.Wood@canberra.edu.au.

Research team

• Allison Wood – Chief Investigator and doctoral candidate, HRI
• Assoc Prof Ro McFarlane – Associate Professor of Public Health, HRI
• Dr Sally Fitzpatrick – Senior Research Fellow, HRI
• Assoc Prof Sue Lukersmith – Senior Academic Project Specialist, HRI
• Assist Prof Ekavi Georgousopoulou – Accredited Practising Dietitian, Discipline Lead in Nutrition and Dietetics, Faculty of Health

This research has been approved by the University of Canberra's Human Research Ethics Committee (ref 114397).