Associate Professor Peter Scarborough
Peter Scarborough
DPhil
Associate Professor and University Research Lecturer
Pete's research focusses are population approached to improve nutrition and the relationship between public health and environmental sustainability. His nutrition research focuses on influences of food choice, including food price, food labelling, marketing of foods and food accessibility.
Pete leads a research programme that develops scenario models to estimate the population-level health impact of changes in the prevalence of behavioural risk factors. This has lead to the development of the Preventable Risk Integrated ModEl (PRIME), which has been used in several published analyses of the role of diet in health including estimates of the impact of health-related food taxation in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand; achieving dietary recommendations in the UK and Canada; and incorporating the cost of greenhouse gas emissions into food prices in the UK.
Pete has published several articles on the development and validation of nutrient profile models (models that classify foods on the basis of their nutritional composition), and was involved in the development of the nutrient profile model used by Ofcom to regulate the broadcast advertising of foods to children in the UK.
Pete has worked for the BHF Centre on Population Approaches for NCD Prevention in various capacities since 2003. He received a DPhil in public health in 2009 for a thesis investigating geographic variations in coronary heart disease rates in England. Pete studied mathematics at undergraduate level.
Recent publications
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A systematic review, and meta-analysis, examining the prevalence of price promotions on foods and whether they are more likely to be found on less-healthy foods.
Journal article
Kaur A. et al, (2020), Public health nutrition, 23, 1281 - 1296
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Impact of the announcement and implementation of the UK Soft Drinks Industry Levy on sugar content, price, product size and number of available soft drinks in the UK, 2015-19: A controlled interrupted time series analysis.
Journal article
Scarborough P. et al, (2020), PLoS medicine, 17
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The contribution of 'chitoumou', the edible caterpillar Cirina butyrospermi, to the food security of smallholder farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso
Journal article
Payne CLR. et al, (2020), FOOD SECURITY, 12, 221 - 234
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Reductions in sugar sales from soft drinks in the UK from 2015 to 2018.
Journal article
Bandy LK. et al, (2020), BMC medicine, 18
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Modelling the health impact of food taxes and subsidies with price elasticities: The case for additional scaling of food consumption using the total food expenditure elasticity.
Journal article
Blakely T. et al, (2020), PloS one, 15