The academic life is a tough and often lonely one. For Fumiaki Imamura, a nutritional epidemiologist who studies diet and its impact on our health, it's only in the past few years that he feels he has finally found his feet. Since 2002, he's lived in the U.S. and the U.K. and his research has taken him from Bangladesh to Guatemala.
Now a senior investigative scientist at the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, one of Imamura's main research projects is studying the links between diet and diabetes, to better understand how diet influences the risk of diabetes and what it means for different societies.
In a recent interview, he talks about how the food industry is reacting to social pressure, though not uniformly: How, for example, some manufacturers are reducing salt and sugar content in processed foods. One of his key concerns, he says, is how information, especially pseudoscience, can spread so easily and quickly in the age of social media. He is working in precisely the field he had hoped for when he was a young student.