Lindsey Smith Taillie

About

Lindsey Smith Taillie, PhD, is a nutrition epidemiologist whose work focuses on designing and evaluating food policies to support healthier and more sustainable diets across the globe. She uses datasets on the food supply, food marketing, food prices, purchases, and dietary intake to evaluate the impact of laws such as sugary drinks and ultraprocessed foods taxes, restrictions on unhealthy food marketing to children, food assistance programs, and front-of-package food labels. Dr. Taillie is co-director of the Global Food Research Program and co-leads a large multi-country project to inform and evaluate healthy food policies worldwide, with a major focus in Latin America, including Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Mexico. Her recent projects include evaluating Chile’s regulations on warning labels, marketing restrictions, and school sales bans on unhealthy foods, as well as quantifying and describing ultraprocessed foods in the US food supply, including food dyes and additives, and developing policies to reduce their consumption. She conducts controlled experiments to inform policy design, such as testing graphic warning labels on sugary drinks and using nudges to promote healthier purchases. Dr. Taillie is also leading efforts to develop artificial intelligence methods for personalized healthy food options and to promote sustainable diets through taxes and food labels that achieve health and environmental co-benefits. Her work on food policy has been covered by major news…

Research topics

• Environmental health
• Medicine
• Business
• Advertising
• Psychology
• Food science
• Marketing
• Computer Science
• Biotechnology
• Biology

Selected publications

• An evaluation of Chile’s Law of Food Labeling and Advertising on sugar-sweetened beverage purchases from 2015 to 2017: A before-and-after study

  PLoS Medicine · 2020 · 485 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: Chile's Law of Food Labeling and Advertising, implemented in 2016, was the first national regulation to jointly mandate front-of-package warning labels, restrict child-directed marketing, and ban sales in schools of all foods and beverages containing added sugars, sodium, or saturated fats that exceed set nutrient or calorie thresholds. The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of this package of policies on household beverage purchases. METHOD AND FINDINGS: In this obser…

  DOI

• Towards unified and impactful policies to reduce ultra-processed food consumption and promote healthier eating

  The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology · 2021 · 324 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Changes in the amount of nutrient of packaged foods and beverages after the initial implementation of the Chilean Law of Food Labelling and Advertising: A nonexperimental prospective study

  PLoS Medicine · 2020 · 222 citations

  BACKGROUND: In June 2016, the first phase of the Chilean Food Labelling and Advertising Law that mandated front-of-package warning labels and marketing restrictions for unhealthy foods and beverages was implemented. We assess foods and beverages reformulation after this initial implementation. METHODS AND FINDINGS: A data set with the 2015 to 2017 nutritional information was developed collecting the information at 2 time periods: preimplementation (T0: January-February 2015 or 2016; n = 4,055) a…

  DOI

• Experimental Studies of Front-of-Package Nutrient Warning Labels on Sugar-Sweetened Beverages and Ultra-Processed Foods: A Scoping Review

  Nutrients · 2020 · 200 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Policies that require front-of-package (FoP) nutrient warnings are becoming increasingly common across the globe as a strategy to discourage excess consumption of sugary drinks and ultra-processed food. However, a better understanding of the pathway through which FoP nutrient warnings work, as well as a review of how outcomes being measured in recent studies map onto this pathway, are needed in order to inform policy on the most effective FoP label design for reducing purchases of ultra-processe…

  DOI

• The Influence of Front-of-Package Nutrition Labeling on Consumer Behavior and Product Reformulation

  Annual Review of Nutrition · 2021 · 195 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  ) studies that objectively assess product reformulation in response to a front-of-package nutrition label implementation. We argue that there is sufficient scientific evidence to recommend that governments implement mandatory front-of-package nutrition labeling systems to improvepopulation health. We also present a conceptual framework to describe front-of-package label influence and provide recommendations for the optimal label design, emphasizing that labeling systems should be highly visible…

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Marissa G. Hall

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  94 shared

• Barry M. Popkin

  61 shared

• Maxime Bercholz

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  46 shared

• Shu Wen Ng

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  44 shared

• Anna H. Grummon

  Stanford University

  41 shared

• Camila Corvalán

  University of Chile

  40 shared

• Shannon N. Zenk

  National Institute of Nursing Research

  36 shared

• Elizabeth M. Anderson

  Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA (United States)

  36 shared

Awards & honors

• Fulbright Scholar Award from University of Sydney
• Carolina Asia Center Curriculum/Course Development Grant 201…
• Finalist, American Society for Nutrition Emerging Leaders in…
• Explorations in Global Health Grant Recipient 2015

Similar researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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• Linda Adairh-106