Open Yale Courses

The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food with Professor Kelly D. Brownell

About the Course

This course encompasses the study of eating as it affects the health and well-being of every human. Topics include taste preferences, food aversions, the regulation of hunger and satiety, food as comfort and friendship, eating as social ritual, and social norms of blame for food problems. The politics of food discusses issues such as sustainable agriculture, organic farming, genetically modified foods, nutrition policy, and the influence of food and agriculture industries. Also examined are problems such as malnutrition, eating disorders, and the global obesity epidemic; the impact of food advertising aimed at children; poverty and food; and how each individual's eating is affected by the modern environment. view class sessions >>

Course Structure:

This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 75 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Fall 2008.


About Professor Kelly Brownell

Kelly D. Brownell is Professor of Psychology, Epidemiology, and Public Health, and Director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, where he also served as Chair of the Department of Psychology and Master of Silliman College. He has published 14 books and more than 300 scientific papers and received awards from a number of professional organizations. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine and in 2006 Time magazine listed Kelly Brownell among "The World's 100 Most Influential People" in its special Time 100 issue featuring those "...whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world."

How to use these pages:

This folder contains course content in HTML format for offline viewing. From this "start" page you can access all of the class sessions by clicking on the link above. The Syllabus page and course resources can be accessed directly from the "contents" folder. If your computer is connected to the Internet, the audio and video files will be accessible via their respective links. To watch or listen to the lectures offline, please download the desired file from the Downloads page on each course.

The folder labeled "IMS" contains a content package of the course files that meet the standards and specifications of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. IMS aims to establish interoperability across multiple platforms for learning systems and learning content. Please visit http://www.imsglobal.org/ for more information.

Yale University 2009. Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page, the pages contained within this folder or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0). Please see the Terms of Use page for more information.