Public health professors study obesity prevention in a "mini-mart" laboratory

Two professors in the Gillings School of Global Public Health are implementing new interdisciplinary tactics to conduct research like never before. 

Marissa Hall and Lindsey Smith Taillie collaborated to create the UNC Mini-Mart — a laboratory space that was converted into a replica of a real convenience store — to study how obesity-prevention policies would work in a realistic but controlled setting. The mart is located at UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. 

Hall — an assistant professor of health behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a member at Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center — brings a research specialty of analyzing how certain warning labels and policies can influence purchasing habits. 

Her background combines with the nutrition epidemiology expertise of Taillie — an assistant professor of nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a fellow at Carolina Population Center. Together, they can examine how those buying habits influence consumer health. 

“Lindsey and I have been having great collaborations. I think because we don’t overlap a lot in our skillsets,” Hall said. “We both bring different things to the table. So it really is a perfect combination.”

Their method of research combines the control of experiments with the real-world exposure to policies that is characteristic of observational studies.

“With this UNC Mini-Mart, we really wanted to bridge these two types of studies and essentially create a lab that allows us to have good experimental control that’s necessary for understanding causal relationships, but also lends realism to the policies and makes them feel real to people,” Hall said. 

Hall and Taillie said they spent many months building the mart — even going to auctions and appliance sales to purchase equipment and fixtures — to create a fully functional mart with packaged and refrigerated items that subjects in the study could actually purchase and take with them. They hoped to increase the realism of the study to improve the validity of the findings. 

Hall said that they are looking at two intervention methods to prevent childhood obesity in the U.S. and globally, including making unhealthy drinks more expensive and putting warning labels on those drinks. 

The researchers are now looking at how sugary drink taxes and health warning labels on sugary drinks can potentially affect the purchasing habits of Latinx parents in North Carolina and whether this is relevant to preventing childhood obesity. 

Hall said they focused on Latinx families for two main reasons: the population typically shows high rates of obesity and other health issues, including Type 2 Diabetes, and the population is usually not included in research studies, despite the fact that they are a quickly growing minority group in the U.S., with a quarter of American children under 18 being Latinx. 

Hall said their study is also an opportunity for greater inclusion in research studies and a stronger focus on health equity. 

Both Hall and Taillie have previously done research and fieldwork in Latin America, so they said this study is a natural extension of their previous global work. 

Dhruv Boinapally, a junior in Gillings School of Public Health, said the work of researchers like Hall and Taillie within the school is important because of the positive change it is spreading.

“Research is the driver for change behind policies that affect everyone in the United States and even the world," Boinapally said. "It is the evidence that convinces politicians, policy makers, and ultimately the general public.”

Taillie and Hall said that they are planning to conduct multiple studies with the mini-mart. 

“We are starting out by looking at the impact of policies to reduce people’s purchases and intake of sugary drinks as a way to prevent obesity,” Taille said. “But later, we hope to add on other health behavior studies. For example, we could use the store to look at point-of-purchase policies and their effects on tobacco or alcohol.”

The two researchers are hoping that, in the future, the UNC Mini-Mart can also be used to conduct research on warnings on the packaging of processed meat, e-cigarettes or even marijuana, in addition to studying purchasing habits of tobacco products and alcohol. 

Hall and Taille believe the store presents a special opportunity to promote interdisciplinary research across university departments, including the possibility of other faculty members to use the mart for their own research.

“Ultimately, we want to be able to provide policymakers with the evidence they need to inform and design effective policies to improve public health,” Taille said. 

@macyemeyer

university@dailytarheel.com