VicHealth researcher: Bebe Loff

″...laws, contractual agreements and funding arrangements operate in favour of agricultural, food manufacturing, and other industries which serve to promote ever increasing consumption″

In order to address and challenge some of the root causes of obesity, Associate Professor Bebe Loff is investigating the elements of the regulatory environment that currently promote it. 

Contact Associate Professor Loff
Phone: 03 9903 0587
Email: Bebe.Loff@med.monsash.edu.au
Website: www.med.monash.edu.au/epidemiology

Bebe’s research examines the regulatory environment that supports obesity with a particular emphasis on social inequalities. This research assumes that international, national and local laws, contractual agreements and funding arrangements, codes and guidelines operate in favour of agricultural, food manufacturing, and other industries which serve to promote ever-increasing consumption.

Based at Monash University, Bebe is Head of the Human Rights and Bioethics Unit in the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine and is currently a Victorian Health Promotion Foundation Senior Research Fellow. The Unit is involved in the fields of health and human rights, bioethics and public health law.

Instead of attempting to deal with obesity after the event, her work aims to reduce this large public health epidemic by identifying, and then addressing the regulatory factors that promote obesity. Thereby obesity may, in some degree, be prevented.

Bebe says that because VicHealth takes an expansive view of public health and health promotion, it is able to recognise the value of research such as her own, work which does not fall neatly into any single discipline.