Children of the 90s is entering a new area of research which examines your health and everyday behaviours by collecting information from your shopping history.

Shopping histories are recorded through loyalty cards (such as the Boots Advantage Card or Sainsbury’s Nectar Card) and can be used by researchers as a valuable source of population level data to measure aspects of behaviour related to health in new ways.

For example, researchers can use this type of data to learn about obesity or heart disease by studying the amount of salt and sugar in the food people buy. As for all data, individuals are not analysed specifically, but overall, shopping data can help us answer real world questions about health.

In the next few months, we will be asking you for your consent to share your shopping records with Children of the 90s. If you decide to opt-in and share your data with us, you will need to provide your loyalty card number(s). You can participate even if you only recently set up your loyalty card account.

Watch this space to read more about using loyalty card data for research.