Dr. Barry M. Popkin is a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he directs UNC-CH's Interdisciplinary Center for Obesity. Popkin has an active U.S. research program in understanding dietary behavior with a focus on eating patterns, trends, and sociodemographic determinants; the nutrition transition and the rapid changes in obesity; dynamic changes in diet, physical activity and inactivity; body composition changes (and the factors responsible for these changes); consequences of these changes; and program and policy options for managing change. He is not only actively involved in research in the United States, but is also active in a number of other NIH-funded studies of countries around the world including detailed longitudinal studies that he directs in China and Russia and related work in Brazil, Mexico, the UAE, and several other countries. Popkin is author of The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies, and Products that are Fattening the Human Race.
Popkin contributed the dangerous idea Tax Fat People to Big Think's "Month of Thinking Dangerously."