Extended Essay in Geography of Food and Health Need Guidance

[MedStudentWannabe]

Hello all!

I am currently in the summer between the first year of IB and the second. Over the first year I came up with the title of: How has the globalization of food in Thailand affected the health of the population in terms of non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and diabetes? I am interested in studying medicine in university in the future and decided to do a medicine related EE in geography as there are no experiments required (unlike the group 4 sciences) and it provides a different aspect of medicine, and I decided to focus it in Thailand as I live here and know the culture. I am interested in nutrition and the health field and think that this subject suits me well. Over the holiday I did a survey of 100 people asking them about their diet and whether or not they have any non communicable diseases to find a correlation to strengthen the conclusion made from analyzing statistics found online. This was all well and good until my brother (who graduated IB) said that what I am doing is obvious in the sense that of course people eating worse in Thailand means their health is impacted and that he thinks it is not very original and will be difficult to find more information about. I already have the survey data and changing my topic completely as per the suggestion of my brother would mean starting over. I think the best option would be to refine my research question to something more original and that I am able to find statistics on and that is why I'm writing here. I would appreciate some feedback about how I can progress, if you have any ideas about how I can alter my approach or if I should change my topic completely to something else.