Jennifer Poti

Biography

Dr. Poti is a nutritional epidemiologist interested in understanding the complexities of the U.S. food supply, purchasing patterns and dietary intake. Her primary research goal is to determine how more refined measures of diet can enhance our ability to identify dietary factors associated with obesity and related chronic disease. Dr. Poti’s research has addressed whether consumption of ready-prepared food, including both fast food and highly processed food, is associated with dietary quality and obesity. She is a member of the UNC Food Research Program and is currently leading the Crosswalk project, which augments national nutrition surveys of dietary intake by creating food composition profiles using UPC barcode-level nutrition information. She is also currently funded to study sources of sodium, saturated fat and trans fat in household food and beverage purchases and to evaluate changes in nutrient content of purchases that may occur as a result of manufacturers’ efforts to reformulate packaged foods and introduce new products. Dr. Poti also is involved in a project that uses NCI methods for estimating usual intake of episodically consumed foods from 24-hour dietary recalls to examine recent trends.

Research Interest

Nutrition