Infos for Students

Topics for Bachelor's or Master's theses

• Understanding Food Environments: Consumer Perceptions of Healthy and Sustainable Choices
  Food environments are widely recognized as key determinants of dietary behavior, shaping what foods are available, affordable, and appealing. Current research highlights that environmental factors often outweigh individual knowledge or intentions in shaping healthy and sustainable eating.
  The aim of the project is to investigate consumers’ perceptions of environmental drivers and barriers to healthy and sustainable eating through an empirical survey. It will analyze how factors such as availability, pricing, convenience, and marketing are perceived and how they relate to self-reported dietary behavior. The results will provide insights into which environmental conditions most strongly support or hinder healthier and more sustainable food choices.
   
• Optimal sampling and recruitment strategies for representative dietary surveys (currently in progress)
  Representative cross-sectional dietary surveys rely on sampling procedures that ensure a close match between the study sample and the target population. In theory, random sampling provides the best foundation for valid population-level inferences. In practice, however, contemporary empirical research faces declining participation rates, selective non-response, and substantial survey drop-out – all of which introduce participation bias and threaten the representativeness of the collected data.
  Therefore, the aim of this project is to identify and evaluate sampling and recruitment strategies that can improve representativeness in dietary surveys. What can nutritional epidemiology learn from earlier methodological work, and what insights can be gained from other empirical research fields that have successfully addressed similar challenges?
   
• Effectiveness of individual pieces of personalized nutrition advice in the Food4Me study
  Food4Me has been one of the largest studies focusing on the effect of personalized nutrition (PN) advice on individuals' dietary behavior. It was shown that PN produced larger and more appropriate changes in dietary behavior than a conventional approach. The respective effect size, however, was quite small.
  Therefore, the aim of this project is to investigate the effectiveness of the individual pieces of PN advice given to the subjects and to identify those recommendations that produced the most substantial and appropriate changes in the subjects' dietary behavior.
   
• Overview of algorithms in Personalized Nutrition 
  Personalized Nutrition (PN) uses a subject's individual information to produce tailored dietary recommendations. In other terms, PN uses input data, feeds them into an algorithm, and obtains output data (i.e. personalized dietary recommendations). Examples of such algorithms are linear or quadratic programming, fuzzy optimizations, decision trees, or modern approaches of machine learning. 
  The aim of the project is to provide an overview of algorithms actually used for PN, be it in a scientific contest or in commercial applications. 
   
• Food-based Dietary Guidelines from a consumer perspective
  Food-based Dietary Guidelines (FBDGs) are published to support healthy (and environment-friendly) food choices in a population. They are developed in the tug of war between desirability from a health and sustainability perspective and acceptability as well as feasibility from a consumer perspective. 
  Therefore, the aim of the project is to shed light on the question of how FBDGs should be designed such that consumers consider them convincing and feasible and are motivated to follow them.

Examples of  completed theses

• Evaluation of the Recent Food-based Dietary Guidelines Published by the German Nutrition Society in 2024 (Completed, spring 2026)
• Erfassung der Ernährungssituation von armutsgefährdeten Haushalten: Entwicklung und Validierung eines Fragebogens im Rahmen des Projekts NutriDono (Completed, spring 2026)
• Ernährungsmuster sowie fördernde und hemmende Faktoren für gesundes Ernährungsverhalten junger Erwachsener in Jordanien (Completed, spring 2026)
• Understanding the Role of Personalised Nutrition in Supporting Self-Management of Obesity: A Qualitative Study among Nigerian Adults (Completed, spring 2026)
• Konzeption einer nutzerzentrierten Ernährungsapp nach den APNAS-Kriterien von Renner et al. (Completed, spring 2026)
• Empirische Analyse von Einflussfaktoren auf den Konsum wenig genutzter Kulturpflanzen im Kontext des DIVERSICROP-Projekts (Completed, winter 2025)
• The Associations Between Sociodemographic Factors and the Habitual Dietary Intake of Adults in Bavaria (Completed, winter 2025)
• Entwicklung eines Index zur Bewertung der Ernährungsqualität von Kunden und Kundinnen der Tafel anhand der FBDGs (Completed, winter 2025)
• Evaluation von KI-generierten vs. wissenschaftlichen Forschungsarbeiten auf Basis der NHANES-Studie (Completed, winter 2025)
• Consumers' Perceived Barriers and Motivations to Follow Denmark’s Official Dietary Guidelines: A Comparison of Consumers Following vs. Not Following the Guidelines and Sociodemographic Differences (Completed, autumn 2025)
• The potential of ChatGPT as a dietary assessment tool for children and adolescents: An analysis of validity and reproducibility using dietary data from the KiGGS Wave II study (Completed, summer 2025)
• Harnessing the Potential of Chickpeas and Peas: A Path towards Sustainable Food Systems in Europe (Completed, summer 2025)
• RoboDiabetic –  Eine Evaluation der Validität und Konsistenz von ChatGPT-Ernährungsempfehlungen für das Selbstmanagement bei Typ-2-Diabetes (Completed, summer 2025)
• ChatGPT told me it's healthy: How can artificial intelligence improve dietary assessment? Opportunities, challenges and limitations (Completed, spring 2025)
• Consumer Attitudes towards recommendations given in sustainable food-based dietary guidelines (Completed, spring 2025)
• Validity and Reproducibility of Dietary Assessment through Image Processing with ChatGPT and MyFitnessPal (Completed, spring 2025)
• Untersuchung der Ernährung von Seniorinnen und Senioren in Bayern anhand der III. Bayerischen Verzehrsstudie (Completed, winter 2024)
• Postprandiale Glukosereaktion - Untersuchung von Einflussfaktoren anhand der Food & You DE Studie (Completed, winter 2024)
• The validity and reproducibility of dietary advice, given by Artificial Intelligence, during pregnancy (Completed, winter 2024)
• Evaluation of nutrition-related measures for workplace health promotion (Completed, summer 2024)
• Ultra-processed foods – Impact on obesity and cardiovascular diseases and implications for food-based dietary guidelines (Completed, summer 2024)
• Assessment of Adults' Food Consumption in Bavaria by Means of Quadratic Programming (Completed, summer 2024)
• The impact of the European Union's approval of entomophagy on the intention of young Nigerians to consume edible insects (Completed, summer 2024)
• Climate impact of Bavarian diets: Underlying food consumption patterns and the role of sociodemographic factors, subjective environmental awareness and eating motives (Completed, spring 2024)
• Influence of social media on the development of obesity and corresponding approaches for prevention and intervention (Completed, winter 2023/24)
• Validation of the use of ChatGPT as a source of reliable nutrition advice for healthy individuals (Completed, winter 2023/24)
• Association of habitual dietary intake with parameters of skeletal muscle area and fat derived by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) A narrative review of sources of bias in nutritional epidemiology studies, and original data analysis (Completed, winter 2023/24)
• Personalized dietary recommendations for obese individuals – A comparison of ChatGPT and the Food4Me algorithm (Completed, winter 2023/24)
• Non-compliance of controls in unblinded dietary intervention studies (Completed, spring 2023)
• Verwendung von Nahrungsergänzungsmitteln in der dritten Bayerischen Verzehrsstudie (2021-2023) (Completed, spring 2023)
• Algorithmen zur Entwicklung lebensmittelbezogener Ernährungsempfehlungen. Überblick und Anwendungsbeispiele (Completed, spring 2023)
• Qualitative assessment of mobile nutrition apps by undergraduate students enrolled for "Life Sciences – Ernährungswissenschaft" (Completed, spring 2023)
• Information requirements for efficient personalized nutrition advice (Completed, autumn 2022)
• Food reformulation: Strategies and evidence (Completed, summer 2022)
• Strengths and weaknesses of photo-based dietary assessment tools (Completed, spring 2022)
• Integration of Behaviour Change Techniques within nutrition-related mobile apps (Completed, summer 2021)
• Impact of food choices on sustainability aspects of diets (Completed, spring 2021)
• Trends in energy intakes over the previous decades (Completed, winter 2021/22)
• Comparison of the nutritional situation in EC Member States based on FAO's Food Balance Sheets (Completed, winter 2021/22)
• Transformation of the results from an online FFQ into optimal user feedback (Completed, winter 2021/22)
• Nutritional situation in Colombia with special focus on the consequences of the flow of refugees from Venezuela (Completed, summer 2020)
• Development of recruiting strategies for an app-based dietary survey among Elderly (Completed, summer 2020)
• Assessment of the nutritional quality of snack bars in the German market based on a nutrient profiling approach (Completed, summer 2020)