![Photo of Ashley Shaw](/assets/images/processed/NoCrop_1000x1000/1336-photo-of-ashley-shaw.jpg)
![Photo of Ashley Shaw](/assets/images/processed/NoCrop_1000x1000/1336-photo-of-ashley-shaw.jpg)
Catching Up with Ashley Shaw, Ph.D., MPH
By Kelly Hale, Communications Coordinator
Feb 09, 2024
Former Pilot Awardee; currently a Research Assistant Professor, Neurology at the University of Kansas Alzheimer’s Disease Center
Ashley Shaw, Ph.D. is committed to helping address health disparities in Alzheimer’s disease through culturally tailoring of dietary interventions. Her pilot project “Factors Influencing Brain Healthy Diets Among African Americans” centered on brain healthy diets in the Black community where she conducted focus groups to gather as much information as possible to meet this challenge for the community head-on.
In her focus groups, she learned that people were not aware of how their diet impacted their brain health and more importantly, how it impacts their risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease.
“Learning from the focus groups was an important piece to appropriately designing an intervention that met the community’s needs. I wanted to make sure that their voices were heard to address barriers they felt were important as it relates to brain health. I knew going into this project that I would need to not only provide more information on healthy diets, but we were going to have to address the three biggest barriers for people: access to healthy foods, the cost of healthy foods, and the perception that healthy foods lacked flavor.”
Another concern for people in the focus groups was maintaining their own traditions while eating healthier.
Shaw decided to look more holistically at the project and introduced an adapted dietary intervention called MIND+SOUL, which includes health coaching, health education and food tasting led by a dietician, and a spiritual component comprised of health scriptures and devotionals.
“The intervention offers built-in accountability through one-on-one health coaching and through spirituality materials in which many of the participants have voiced that they liked. Through this intervention, many of the participants have become friends and they regularly share healthy recipes with one another,” she said.
And while the project is still ongoing, Shaw has bigger plans for the intervention that include a cardiovascular component, along with expanding the intervention to better the meet the needs of Black communities across the United States.
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