Shu Wen Ng

About

Shu Wen Ng, PhD, is a health economist and professor in the Department of Nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Her primary scholarly objective is to enhance understanding of individual and household-level decisions regarding dietary and activity behaviors and their impacts on health. Her research considers the constraints imposed by monetary, time, and biological factors, and how these decisions are made within broader environmental or policy contexts. Dr. Ng employs tools and approaches from economics, epidemiology, sociology, and public policy, collaborating with experts across these disciplines. Her research focuses on innovations such as combining large secondary data sources to identify macro-level levers like policy and industry pledges, creating new metrics to measure shifts in eating and activity cultures, and analyzing the circumstances under which these shifts occur to identify effective and sustainable health behavior changes. She has been a co-investigator on several foundation and NIH-funded studies utilizing 'big-data' on commercial store sales, household purchases, and nutrition label data, alongside dietary intake and nutrition databases, to study the effects of policies like taxation and quotas on consumer behavior and health outcomes. Additionally, Dr. Ng has analyzed historical time-use data from various countries to estimate activity levels and identify trends among different subpopulations.

Research topics

• Environmental health
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Business
• Psychology
• Marketing
• Geography
• Artificial Intelligence
• Gerontology

Selected publications

• The nutrition transition to a stage of high obesity and noncommunicable disease prevalence dominated by ultra‐processed foods is not inevitable

  Obesity Reviews · 2021 · 549 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The Nutrition Transition model is presented with the nature and pace of change in key stages varying by location and subpopulations. At present, all high-income and many low- and middle-income countries are in a stage of the transition where nutrition-related noncommunicable diseases including obesity, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension are dominating adult morbidity and mortality and are very high or growing rapidly in prevalence. Some countries still have key subpopulations facing hunger and un…

  DOI

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

  The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology · 2021 · 324 citations

  DOI

• Global dietary quality in 185 countries from 1990 to 2018 show wide differences by nation, age, education, and urbanicity

  Nature Food · 2022 · 231 citations

  Evidence on what people eat globally is limited in scope and rigour, especially as it relates to children and adolescents. This impairs target setting and investment in evidence-based actions to support healthy sustainable diets. Here we quantified global, regional and national dietary patterns among children and adults, by age group, sex, education and urbanicity, across 185 countries between 1990 and 2018, on the basis of data from the Global Dietary Database project. Our primary measure was t…

  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

  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

  ) 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

• Barry M. Popkin

  122 shared

• Lindsey Smith Taillie

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  44 shared

• Marissa G. Hall

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  19 shared

• Elizabeth Dunford

  19 shared

• Arun Azad

  Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre

  18 shared

• Jenny Casanova

  Australian Red Cross Lifeblood

  18 shared

• O'Shaughnessy

  Deakin University

  18 shared

• Patsy Yates

  Queensland University of Technology

  18 shared

Education

• PhD, Health Policy and Management

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Awards & honors

• Delta Omega Honorary Public Health Society (2015)
• Frank Porter Graham Honor Society for “significant contribut…
• UNC Junior Faculty Development Award (2014)

Similar researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Cynthia Bulikh-134
• Linda Adairh-106