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Academics work with Committee to scrutinise Government proposal on childhood obesity

11 January 2018

Two Parliamentary Academic Fellows: Dr Oliver Mytton and Dr Thijs van Rens, have been appointed to help the Committee scrutinise Government plans to tackle childhood obesity.

Two Parliamentary Academic Fellows have been appointed to work with the Health Committee on its ongoing scrutiny of the Government's plans to tackle childhood obesity. Currently they are undertaking an evidence review to identify interventions that show promise in reducing child obesity amongst more deprived communities, in preparation for further Committee work on this subject in spring 2018.

Dr Oliver Mytton

Dr Mytton is an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in Public Health at the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) and the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge. He is a medical doctor and academic, holding a PhD in public health from the University of Cambridge and a Masters of Public Health from Harvard University. His work has sought to understand the health impact of structural interventions that may improve diets or increase physical activity (e.g. food taxes, investment in walking and cycling). He is part of a team of researchers evaluating the health impact of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy. He is also a public health registrar at Hertfordshire County Council, where he is co-lead on the Hertfordshire arm of a national pilot of ‘whole systems approaches to tackle obesity'.

Dr Thijs van Rens

Dr van Rens is an Associate Professor of economics at the University of Warwick, and a research associate at the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE), the Centre for Macroeconomics (CfM) at the LSE, and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Thijs holds a PhD from Princeton University, and has consulted at the OECD and the European Commission. His research mostly deals with labour market issues, but Thijs is currently working on the economics of food and obesity, and specifically on the role of food prices for the obesity epidemic and the widening gaps in obesity rates across communities of different income levels. He is academic co-lead of the Global Research Priority on food at Warwick.

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Further information

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