In the ninth episode of the Faces of Food podcast, we meet Dr. Modi Mwatsama, the Senior Science Lead for Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health at Wellcome Trust.
Among her food-system related achievements, Dr. Mwatsama helped to secure the inclusion of sustainability considerations within the UK Government’s Eatwell Guide to healthy eating and win health-promoting changes to the EU Common Agriculture Policy.
Dr. Mwatsama leads the food system, nutrition and health strand of ‘Our Planet, Our Health’ at the Wellcome Trust, and is looking for science that will help drive healthy and sustainable food system change.
The Next Big Research Question
“As a human race, we won’t be able to survive in the future if we don’t have a planet of which to live. And at the moment climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the world and there isn’t really enough action,” says Dr. Mwatsama in the podcast episode. “So we are very much interested in investing in the research that can really drive action to address this important challenge”.
During the EAT Stockholm Food Forum 2019, Dr. Mwatsama and the team from Wellcome Trust’s Our Planet, Our Health went out on a quest to determine: What are the next big questions in science?
The Wellcome Trust is an independent global charitable foundation and one of EAT’s founding members. The Wellcome Trust takes on big health challenges, supports researchers and campaign for better science and solely funded the groundbreaking EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health, a science report bringing more than 30 world-leading scientists to reach a scientific consensus that defines a healthy and sustainable diet.
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