Question

-How does bias affects public health research and policy?

-In your own words, please define what nutrition epidemiology is and provide an example of a study?

Answer 1

Ans) Health Policy:

- Subset of the larger arena of public policy.

- Health policy refers to decisions, plans, and actions that are undertaken to achieve specific health care goals within a society. An explicit health policy can achieve several things: it defines a vision for the future which in turn helps to establish targets and points of reference for the short and medium term. It outlines priorities and the expected roles of different groups; and it builds consensus and informs people.

The Policy Making Process:
1. Problem Identification 2. Policy Agenda 3. Policy Formulation 4. Policy Adoption 5. Policy Implementation 6. Policy Evaluation 7. Policy Revision
Healthy People prioritizes the issues that affect the health of the U.S. population

Collaboration of private and public organizations to set evidence-based national objectives aimed at improving the health of the population.

Large number of specific objectives organized into topic areas.

- Bias is a form of systematic error in research and presents a formidable challenge. There are concerns about selection bias in participant cohorts, clinical and administrative bias by those who provide the intervention, and publication bias because journals are more likely to accept manuscripts that demonstrate effectiveness.

- Nutritional epidemiology is the study of how diet affects health and disease in human populations, or the science of public health nutrition.

- The general approach to these studies consists of assessing dietary intake in groups of people and then examining disease rates. Statistical models are used to quantify the associations between diet and disease.

- A major challenge in nutritional epidemiology is that self-reported dietary intake is subject to random and systematic bias. In addition, people who adhere to healthy dietary patterns often have other healthy lifestyle behaviors, such as engaging in leisure physical activity; disentangling these exposures in relation to health outcomes is difficult.

- Although the complete elimination of error in dietary assessment methods is not a realistic objective, a better understanding of these errors (based on objective biomarkers) combined with statistical methods to address these errors may be an attainable goal. Despite the challenges, nutritional epidemiology has made major contributions to general dietary recommendations as well as legislative and policy matters related to diet and health.