Asha Kaur

Asha’s research looks at population diets and the health impacts of different marketing techniques. Her research interests include food prices, labelling, nutrient profiling, and population-level health modelling.  Asha also teaches on the NDPH MSc Global Health Science programme, the Medical Sciences Division Clinical training programme, and on the Human Sciences undergraduate course.  

Asha was recently awarded an NDPH Intermediate Fellowship titled “TransforMMMD: TRANSFORming UK population dietary advice into Micro, Meso, and Macro Diets and measuring their health, cost, and environmental impacts”. This project builds upon Asha’s earlier work where she modelled the potential diet, cost and health implications of achieving the Eatwell Guide (the UK government’s dietary advice).

Prior to this Asha was awarded an NDPH Early Career Fellowship to investigate the impact of price promotions on dietary choices and health outcomes.  Asha also worked on the CLYMBOL project which looked at the role of health-related symbols and claims on food labels in consumer behaviour. This research was also the focus of her DPhil (titled “The health impact of health and nutrition claims in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Slovenia”). This work involved measuring the prevalence and the nutritional quality of foods carrying claims, and modelling their diet and health impact, and the impact of potential regulatory scenarios, using UK population mortality data.

Other projects that Asha has worked on include; the microPRIME project, the BetterBasket project, the FLICC project, and the British Heart Foundation’s Coronary Heart Disease Statistics publications. She’s also been involved in several literature reviews including a Cochrane systematic review update on physical activity interventions and, more recently, a systematic review of the impact of health-related claims on dietary choices and price promotions.

Asha joined the Centre on Population Approaches for Non-Communicable Disease Prevention in 2007. Before that she worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford's Health Services Research Unit working on a systematic review of forensic mental health outcomes. Asha graduated in 2005 with a BSc in Clinical Psychology from the University of Kent.