Ada L Garcia

Dr. Ada L Garcia is a Senior Lecturer in Human Nutrition at the School of Medicine, Dentistry & Nursing, University of Glasgow. She is a UK registered Public Health Nutritionist leading the Public Health Nutrition component at the MSc Human Nutrition program. Her work focuses on improving dietary intake in infants and young children, designing and evaluating public health nutrition interventions at community level to reduce health inequalities, and studying food matrix interactions influencing bioavailability and metabolic responses.

Dr. Garcia earned her PhD in Nutritional Physiology and Pathophysiology from the University of Potsdam, Germany, and a BSc in Nutrition from the University of San Carlos in Guatemala. She previously worked as a clinical nutritionist with undernourished children in rural Guatemala and held postdoctoral positions at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DiFE) and Queen's University in Belfast.

Her research spans infant nutrition, complementary feeding practices, commercial baby foods, feeding behaviors, dietary fiber, fruit and vegetable intake, preschool interventions, and malnutrition in low-income countries. Key projects include commercial baby food surveys that influenced UK and European policies on baby food reformulation, nutritional quality assessments of children's foods, and infant eating behavior measurement tools developed with Prof. Charlotte Wright.

Dr. Garcia's recent publications demonstrate strong focus on commercial baby food composition and marketing, breastfeeding practices, and community-based dietary interventions. Her work bridges high-income settings like Scotland with low-income contexts such as Nairobi, Kenya, examining how food marketing affects infant feeding practices and how cooking programs can improve eating behaviors in disadvantaged communities.

She actively collaborates with public health organizations including NHS Ayrshire & Arran, Lanarkshire Community Food and Health Partnership, and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde on community-based nutrition interventions such as cooking programs for parents and caregivers, nursery-based initiatives to reduce food fussiness, and community cooking programs that improve eating behaviors in low socioeconomic groups.