Bio:

Van Thi Thuy Duong is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Nutrition and Food Science, University of Medicine and Pharmacy at Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Her research mainly focuses on the linkages between diet quality, nutrition, and health outcomes on one side and branches out to investigate the relations between agriculture, food systems and nutrition on another side. Fully funded by Vietnam Government, in 2017, Duong received her master’s degree in Human Nutrition at the University of Chester, the UK. Then, she became a fellow of the NIHN Fellowship Program for Asian researchers at the Japan National Institute of Health and Nutrition. From 2018 to 2022, she conducted her PhD in healthy and sustainable diets in Vietnam as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) project in the Division of Human Nutrition and Health, Wageningen University and Research. 

Project summary:

Like most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), Vietnam has undergone a marked nutrition transition in recent decades, bringing with it an increase in poor nutrition and health outcomes. Therefore, more effective interventions in food systems must be undertaken to ensure access to healthy foods and diets and increase the opportunities to achieve higher diet quality and thus better nutrition outcomes for the population. However, the analyses of diet quality and nutrition outcomes as they relate to food access and other related factors in Vietnam and other LMICs, have been limited due to the lack of appropriate metrics and databases. Thus, the integrated research proposed under this IMMANA Fellowship programme aims to combine dietary intake data, nutritional outcome data, and food price data, connecting novel diet quality metrics to the cost and affordability metrics in order to better explain the linkages between food access, diet quality, and nutrition outcomes at different levels.