Matsystemer, helse og økologi i Bhutan: en komparativ etnografisk tilnærming (EATWELL)

The main aim of EATWELL is to understand how socio-cultural aspects shape food systems shaping food and nutrient intake, and added to this, how the former shape the composition of the gut microbiome and its functional potentials. The key purpose in this research is thus to come closer to an understanding of how biosocial environmental factors, focusing on food and nutrition, interplay with gut microbial ecologies, and so ultimately shape health. We conduct an anthropological part entailing participant observation and qualitative interviews across 7 different sites in Bhutan, followed by a nutritional survey with 24-h dietary recalls and collection of stool samples in 3 of these 7 sites. We will collect the stool samples together with the nutritional data and ethnographic information to correlate these different data sets to tease out correlations and potential causalities in the environment-food-microbiome-health nexus.