Dr Jana Anderson
- Research Fellow (Public Health)
telephone:
0141 330 8547
email:
Jana.Anderson@glasgow.ac.uk
Public Health, 1 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8rz
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7290-6635Biography
Research background and experience
I work as a research fellow within the Public Health unit in the School of Health & Wellbeing. I built my experience and skills on the varied portfolio of research projects I completed in the past. After choosing zoology for my undergraduate studies, I switched to Medical Parasitology for my master’s degree. This was followed by the 4-year Wellcome Trust-funded PhD in Molecular functions in disease, where I studied parasitic DNA sequences in human DNA that are implicated in certain cancers.
My experience up until then was mostly field and/or laboratory-based, first focused on animal behaviour, then ecology and epidemiology of zoonotic diseases followed by biochemical parasitology that included research on biochemical structure of proteins, enzymatic pathways and metabolic pathways leading to epigenetic control of protein expression and silencing.
It was the significant involvement of epigenetics in many diseases (including metabolic, immunological, cancer and psychiatric diseases) that steered my interest to health, its risk factors and ill-health prevention. However, I kept my interest in our environment and the strong link between our health and our environment.
Current research interests
Nutritional epidemiology
Following from my PhD project, I learned that the varied epigenetic modifications could be altered by diet, stress, exercise, lifestyle, and exposure to certain environmental stimuli and can have lasting effects on health of not only the individuals involved but also their offsprings. These modifications often occur early before the start of the disease and are potentially reversible.
So after my PhD, I began my work in public health to study if and how much could ill health be prevented by positive changes within our lifestyle and environment, how much can these protect us against or slow down disease development, whether this is via epigenetic modifications or other mechanisms. I chose to focus on diet and related risk factors and its link to health and chronic disease such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and diet-related cancers using mostly nutritional epidemiology research methods to look at data population-size datasets.
Sustainable protein sources
Because of my zoology and ecology background, I am also very interested in sustainability of our diet and understanding what dietary choices are sustainable to our environment, as well as the impact our dietary choices and preferences have on waste production and climate change.
For example, for a well-nourished adult, we know that decreasing the amount of red meat and treating it as a luxury rather then a staple, it would drastically reduce the impact of our food on the environment as well as protect our health. People are concerned about transport, flight carbon footprint etc, but adapting our diet to plant-based sources is easy to achieve and needs to happen now.
Agriculture is the single highest driver of climate and environmental change and is behind as much as 30% global greenhouse gas emissions with red meat and other animal products responsible for more than half of these. This is despite providing only a fifth of the calories we eat and drink. By opting for the traditional Sunday roast, and choosing food that is plant, poultry and fish-based for the rest of the week, we can feed the expanding human population and strictly protect the environment and the biodiversity that we deeply depend on to survive both for us and for our future generations.
Recent funding
BBSRC Agri-Food Technology Seeding Catalyst: Feasibility study of Eisenia foetida as a direct or indirect food source (£5,770)
Research interests
Research focus
Nutritional epidemiology:
Link between diet and chronic disease including cardiometabolic, obesity, diabetes and cancer
Main data source: UK Biobank
Sustainable diet:
Sustainable protein sources
Impact of our diet on environment, waste connected with food production
Dietary choices
Systematic reviews of sustainable protein sources
Grants
Grants and Awards listed are those received whilst working with the University of Glasgow.
- Healthy and sustainable protein sources -linking healthy diets to sustainable diets using expert guidance on existing studies, access new data sources and methodology
Natural Environment Research Council
2022 - 2022
- Nutrition Related Foetal Programming and Mental Health Outcomes in Offspring: a Social Perspective
British Dietetic Association
2019 - 2021
Supervision
I am happy to supervise research projects, masters or PhD students in any area of nutrition, nutritional epidemiology, nutrition linked risk factors and chronic disease as well as any aspect of sustainable food production, food waste and environment. Please contact me and I can redirect you to the correct place for application. Co-supervision also welcomed. Funded students welcomed.
PhD supervision
Friel, C - Maternal nutritional status in pregnancy and offspring Autism Spectrum Disorder: a social perspective
Masters in Public Health
Nicoletti, A - A pandemic cuisine: A content analysis of British and European media portrayals of animal-based diets in relation to the threat of zoonotic diseases in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
Rosca, S -The role of C reactive protein in the association between red meat intake and metabolic outcomes. A population based cross-sectional study.
Zhang, Y- Examining the role of C-reactive protein in the association between red, processed and total red meat intake and prevalent and incident colorectal cancer: analysis of the UK Biobank cohort
Roux, S - The Association Between Participation in Two Governmental Nutritional Assistance Programs with Healthy Food Choice and Food
Security, Adjusted for Confounding Factors. A cross-sectional study of USDA’s National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey.
MacDonald, K- Is Meat Consumption Associated With Cardiometabolic Disease? A Cross-Sectional Study
Friel, C - Comparison of three methods to analysis dietary patterns in a cross sectional study of the association between diet and depression
Shen, W- The role of antioxidant supplements in moderating the association between air pollution and hypertension
Mackay, A- Is daily driving time associated with harmful lifestyle behaviours? A population based cross-sectional study
Darwis, N- Association between Red Meat and Processed Meat in Colorectal and Breast Cancer: A Meta-Analyses and Prospective General Population Cohort Study
MSc Food Security
Archibald, E - Transforming to a healthy and sustainable food system: A comparative analysis of Scotland and Denmark.
Wang, J - Comparison of consumer’s acceptance of in vitro meat and insect-based food as alternatives to traditional meat and plant-based meat replacement in western countries.
Labrousse, S – A systematic review of the environmental impact of products of animal origin
Gao, L- A systematic review of the suitability of earthworms as fish and poultry feed, and their comparison to black soldier fly and traditional feed
