I'm Stanley Roszak Phillips, Uncrossed College, Oxford, and professor of Human Ecology at the University of Oxford School of Anthropology.
My everyday research life at the University of Oxford is guided by two themes.
The first of these is that of evolution and human diet and nutrition.
Second of these is body fatness and obesity and how it's produced in human populations with this theme body faintness and obesity.
I direct the unit for bio cultural variation and obesity,
which concerns itself with social and societal aspects of food, diet, body size, body, fatness and nutritional state.
We as a group have been going since 2007 and you can find us and catch up with our programme of research on w w w dot.
Oxford Obesity dot org. And also with our podcasts on university books to podcasts.
My work on Kurban 19 Lockdown is an ongoing element of a project that was running before Code 19.
The pandemic has dominated headlines everywhere over the past 12 months,
affecting the lives and activities of everybody across the four corners of the globe.
Across the year, I've had podcast conversations with fellows who are at the frontline of coping 19 research in many different ways.
I've spoken with Andrew Pollard, with Rana Mitter, with Michael Parker.
Achilleas. Captain needs Dan Hicks. Matthew Snape and Julian Sabal Lesco.
It's been a privilege to share their quest for knowledge about Koban 19 and its impacts.
This particular podcast now is about my own involvement in Copan 19 research.
First, let me take you back to March 2020 at the University of Oxford.
Hillary term was coming to a close.
I recall giving my very last lecture of term on the very last day of term electron obesity appetite and eating in this lecture.
I usually demonstrate a point about eating pleasure in the brain by offering chocolate to the students.
Dark chocolate or milk? Chocolate. According to preference.
Then asking them about their mental experience of consuming the small piece of chocolate that I'd just offered them.
This time when I offered chocolate, there were absolutely no takers, none at all.
Something had changed. Students were refusing free chocolate.
A couple of weeks later, we went into lockdown, lockdown one, as it's now known, prior to convict 19.
The research, my group with co researchers Caroline Potter,
Karrine Ellie and Leavis Hall in an obit skirt and Sabine Parish was an understanding how the domestic
environment mediated physical activity and eating in the production of overweight and obesity.
This is an important and under researched aspect of the production of health and wellbeing,
given that people spend a lot of time at home in the domestic space, especially across winter.
This was work of policy relevance at the time, but it became even more so with the post lockdown in the UK.
I know everybody has their own experience and locked down their own memories.
The uncertainty is the anxiety, interpreting the rules, working out what you could and could not do,
and the panic buying of food, storing up food from unknown future.
This in itself was all very interesting and important from a research perspective.
My decades of research on the evolutionary basis of overeating told me that this was to be expected.
This is because the main way for all animal species to deal with uncertainty is to hoard food,
either by eating as much as they can and storing fat on their body, or by keeping it in storage in one way or another.
What was happening in the UK and in many other countries was a classic response to uncertainty.
My family did it, too. We stored like everybody else. And then there was what,
panic buying due to the food supply chain as unexpected patterns of food buying disrupted the Just-In-Time supply chain expert
systems that are governed by purchasing patterns as well as the epicentre of the pandemic being and will hand in China,
which itself is a key place in the global supply chain. For most things locked down in hand created food supply habit across the world.
The research we did in the UK involved understanding the impact of Pope 19 Lockdown's on physical and mental health.
Our existing work,
prior to Copan 19 was in response to a policy relevant need to understand how the domestic sphere influences health and health behaviour.
Then along came Copan 19, which made this type of research pressingly important, especially during the first lockdown.
When people really didn't know what was happening,
we wanted to determine what effects household isolation and social distancing would have on mental and physical health.
The aim was to inform policy initiatives based on sound evidence of current and emerging patterns
within household environments that would impact on the health of the population of the UK.
We were well positioned, given our previous research, to modify our research protocols very quickly and effectively.
The work we did. A novel survey carried out online was funded by the University of Oxford Social Science Traditions Cauvin, 19.
Urgent response fund with the intention of undertaking it rapidly and conducting
speedy analysis to write and submit to INSIGHT reports for the UK Parliament.
From start to finish, we had first report out within eight weeks of the project being initiated.
Dramatic progress in terms of doing a very rapid pace of survey work, including the analysis.
Over a thousand people responded. Many responded to follow up research, which was undertaken at the height of lockdown.
One found that dietary patterns suddenly shifted better for some worse than many in response to reduced access to usual food supplies.
Physical activity levels also changed sharply, increasing for some, while dramatically reducing others.
Remember early in lockdown, though, so many people on their bicycle cycling every once while there were many more
people who were stuck at home not able to do anything or go out very much.
There was also a stark rise in negative mental health, especially in suicidal tendencies and in disordered eating.
Related to this was increased binge eating and consumption of processed snacks and of alcohol.
Health outcomes were generally worse amongst those experiencing economic insecurity.
And in young people, you had the worst mental health outcomes even after taking into account economic insecurity.
Older people seemed to be more resilient.
Something that we weren't expecting and something that we're trying to understand better with a more detailed analysis right now.
Three national lockdowns have each dramatically shifted people's living and working routines, with many people working,
learning or furloughed at home and with gyms, leisure facilities and non-essential retail outlets closed.
There've been many huge changes in levels of physical activity and eating patterns, as well as in mental health.
Most of the things that we observed were interrelated.
Domestic space became very important and underwent upheaval as people struggled to adapt to full time work from home.
People got bored. People got irritable, tired.
Many snacked much more and developed an affinity for the very foods that can lead to obesity and increase fatness,
but which tastes so good and so, so comforting in times of stress.
In parallel with this, I ran a podcast series called Lockdown Food with a former St Cross student test bird.
She went on to do a deep fill with me and she's since graduated in a lockdown food.
We interviewed people both academic and non-academic, about their experiences with food under Pope 19.
The interviews were recorded online and we could see how things were with food through the eyes of our interviewees in Denmark and Switzerland,
in Spain, in the United States, in India, as well as in the UK.
This comparison has given us a strong record of this time in history when so much went wrong with food.
Although the surveys are finished, no more data being collected. The work goes on.
We are continuing our analysis and right up for scientific publication,
making sense of the complex and changing sets of relationships that have influenced health and health behaviours across the year or so.
A pandemic beyond the immediately apparent. We have submitted to INSIGHT reports to the UK Parliament as we promised,
and an evidence brief on childhood obesity has gone to deferent the UK government department.
This was the UK. Post Brexit National Food Strategy,
which incorporated obesity as a consideration late in the day when it was realised that obesity is a major contributor to COPD.
19 deaths have also submitted evidence to a House of Lords enquiry into postcode 19 futures, which is now underway.
And I'm involved in a UK Parliament policy work programme on childhood obesity.
All told, it's been a unexpectedly busy year and there's plenty more to do.