Designing Law for Nutrition-Related Health

This multi-disciplinary workshop seeks to initiate the development of a model which can improve regulatory design for nutrition and health needs in food law. It will bring together academics, practitioners and policy-makers from a range of disciplines and locations to explore whether and how public health nutrition research can inform better the design and implementation of European Union (EU) food law. Contributing disciplines will be social sciences, public health nutrition, business studies and law.

Much has been written on different styles of regulation but there is very little work which seeks to develop a theoretical approach to integrating scientific research into the design and implementation of regulation in the context of nutrition and health. The operation of much regulatory law is frequently described as a barrier to innovation and development. This is arguably because it often fails to incorporate domain specific knowledge, e.g. in the area of food and health, into the design stage of regulation.

This workshop will seek to initiate the development of a regulatory design model in respect of food law so as to promote public health, taking account of the interdisciplinary approach necessary to design good regulation.

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS

Professor Rosalind Malcolm, Environmental Regulatory Research Group, School of Law.

Professor Monique Raats, Director of the Food Consumer Behaviour and Health Research Centre, University of Surrey (m.raats@surrey.ac.uk)

The workshop is a collaboration between the University of Surrey’s multidisciplinary Food, Consumer Behaviour and Health Research Centre (FCBH) and the University’s Environmental Regulatory Research Group (ERRG), a group of lawyers who specialise in examining regulatory frameworks which impact on environmental areas such as water and sanitation, environmental and public health, natural resources and climate change. ERRG members specialise in working alongside other disciplines in a range of fields including the natural sciences, engineering and technology and the humanities. Current multi-disciplinary projects include: FP7 EU funded- REDICLAIM ‘Understanding the impact of legislation on “REduction of DIsease risk” CLAIMs on food and drinks’ and D-BOX (also FP7 EU funded) ‘Demining tool-BOX for humanitarian clearing of large scale areas from anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions’.

Image: Geoffrey Whiteway