CHOMI Seminar

The Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland invites you to our first seminar of the semester.   We very much hope you can join us for what promises to be a very interesting talk.
Dr Jane Hand (University of Warwick)
 ‘Health on the High Street: Consumerism, the NHS and Low-Fat Diets in Britain since the 1970s’
5 pm Thursday 8 February 2018
Room K114, School of History, Newman Building, UCD
Since the postwar period food choice and diet have become increasingly intertwined with wider health and food policies focused on disease prevention, public health and medical service provision. This paper will chart the development of food choice as an important health behavior promulgated through both public health and primary and secondary care. It will emphasise the role food and health consumerism played in communicating scientific evidence about the impact of healthy eating on disease prevention to the public. To do so, it will examine the development of low-fat products by certain supermarkets, focusing in particular on the creation of market segmentation around low-fat milk. It uses this case study to emphasise the interconnectedness of the NHS and the retail sector in attempting to reduce chronic disease mortality rates.
Dr Jane Hand is a Research Fellow for the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award ‘The Cultural History of the NHS’ at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD in 2015, also at the University of Warwick. She is currently writing a monograph that examines the role of the food industry and retailers in selling particular forms of healthy behaviours to the public. It emphasises the increasing interconnectedness of health policy, NHS nutritional guidance and the rise of health consumerism since the 1970s.