Researchers from the University of Newcastle will be on the beat at AgQuip looking for people to help shine a light on rural diets.

Regional and remote locations have often been associated with poorer health in terms of obesity rates and fruit and vegetable intake.

With more than 100,000 people expected to come through gates during the three-day farm-fest, the researchers will be hoping there’ll be a few punters happy to help uncover some knowledge about rural diets.

“We’re going to look at mapping what health measures we get against postcodes,” Tamworth dietitian Leanne Brown said.

“There is data out there about height and weight, but there’s not a lot of detailed data out there about food intake.”

The researchers will be taking height, weight and waist measurements, a brief survey on physical activity, as well as testing skin colour to determine fruit and veggie intake with a spectrophotometer.

“It looks at the carotenoids, which are underneath the skin, which basically come from your fruit and vegetables,” she said.

“So presumably, the better your intake, the better your colour is.”

The machine could be seen as a lie-detector when it comes to assessing diets.

“There’s a good reason to use our usual tools of assessing dietary intake, but this is a good back-up measure, particularly from a research perspective, because we often ask people ‘what did you eat’ and you only get half the information,” Dr Brown said.

AgQuip is the first major event the university will be taking its diet research to, but there’s already plans to take it to some other annual shindigs on the calendar.

Dr Brown said targeting big gatherings such as AgQuip provided an opportunity to collect data from a range of regions.

Broader studies have indicated “fruit and vegetable intake is lower and that people are more overweight, the more remote you go,” Dr Brown said.