PhD defence T. (Tim) van Meurs

Below is a brief summary of the dissertation:

NNon-communicable diseases due to obesity are increasingly common. Obesity is partly caused by unhealthy diets. Therefore, official health promotion institutions - for example in healthcare, science and politics - implement nutrition interventions aimed at promoting healthy diets. However, many of these interventions are less effective among less educated citizens, further widening the already significant gap that exists in terms of nutritional health. In particular, interventions that provide information to citizens on (un)healthy dietary behaviour are less effective among lower-educated than among higher-educated citizens. Structural interventions - which are less easy to circumvent - are more promising from the point of view of equality in effectiveness. When it comes to the social acceptability of interventions, on the contrary, interventions that allow freedom of choice are more accepted by citizens than restrictive interventions. However, what is mostly missing in intervention studies is the perspective of citizens themselves, although this could explain social patterns in both effectiveness and acceptability. This thesis - informed by an early interview phase that was aborted due to COVID-19-related measures, a semi-structured content analysis of social media responses to Dutch news stories about health interventions, and insights from neighbouring sociological fields - examines the role that anti-institutionalism (i.e., aversion to official institutions) plays in citizens' receptivity to nutrition interventions.