FOOD-FRAMES

Our current food system contributes to major environmental challenges and rising diet-related chronic diseases. Enabling healthy and sustainable diets requires food environments that actively support better choices, yet todays food information environment often does the opposite. Pervasive food marketing and mis- and disinformation distort public understanding, amplify politicized narratives, and place responsibility unfairly on individuals, making it difficult for people to make healthy and sustainable food choices. FOOD-FRAMES is a research collaboration across eight European countries Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway to study these systemic drivers and co- create evidence-based policy solutions. It combines expertise from a range of scientific disciplines including public health, nutritional science, psychology and law to advance our understanding of underlying mechanisms and promote sustainable change. The Austrian research team will focus on studying the underlying psychological mechanisms of online food-related misinformation and marketing to derive interventions. First, the team will conduct several studies to understand how exposure to food misinformation and marketing in online environments influences attitudes, intentions, and actual food consumption. For this, the project will comprise both large-scale surveys and in-depth daily assessments of core psychological factors across multiple European countries. Simultaneously, the project will map the online food misinformation environment. It will track online food content using semi-automated webscraping tools and voluntary social media data donations from individuals. Both data sources will be integrated to paint a comprehensive picture of the extent and impact of online food misinformation exposure. Second, building up on these insights, the project will identify and refine interventions that can be applied at the population level, e.g. through new policies, to counteract food misinformation exposure. For this, the research team will combine systematic literature reviews and expert surveys. The resulting interventions will be tested in cross-country trials to derive recommendations for national and EU- level policy.