Course:LFS250/Week 18

Overview

In this session, we will discuss the concept of food environments and their effects on food-related behaviours across the food system: growing, preparing, sharing and managing end wastes.

• ONE PRESENTATION in tutorial

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to:

• Define food environment
• Articulate the relationship between food environments, policy, and health

Key Terms + Concepts

• Food environment

Required Readings + Resources

• Health Canada. 2013. Measuring the food environment in Canada. (pp. 7-29). Available from: http://www.foodsecuritynews.com/resource-documents/MeasureFoodEnvironm_EN.pdf

Notes

• Contributing Authors: Madeleine Daepp and Adrienne Levay

Food Environments

We all live in a food environment. Our households are a food environment. Our places of work are food environments. Our neighbourhoods, cities, towns and provinces are food environments. Our country is a food environment. The world is a food environment. At the individual level, in our households, we have a fair amount of control over what the food environment is. Some people only buy organic, whole foods while others tend towards pre-packaged and processed food items. Household food decisions are impacted by your own personal value system, your food literacy skills, your culture, your finances, your taste preferences, your lifestyle, etc. BUT, arguably, you still do not have full control over what your household food environment is because of the larger food environments that surround you. Perhaps your house is located in a suburb and the closest grocery store is a Superstore and you have a very busy lifestyle. Will you actually take time to drive into an urban area to shop around at farmer’s markets on your day off and hope the types of foods you want to purchase are available? Or say you live in a neighbourhood with numerous green grocers giving you quick access to affordable produce. But perhaps you’d like to have meat with your locally grown produce and there is no store that sells the kind of meat you’d like to have, sustainable and local chicken that had a nice life. Perhaps all that is available is frozen, processed fish fillets from Asia. The surrounding food environment, then, greatly impacts what types of food you have the ability/capacity to surround yourself with in your household which can influence your health and well-being.

How do we decide what to eat? How did Canadian obesity rates reach epidemic proportions in the course of the past three decades (Starky 2005; Navaneelan and Janz 2014)? And why are fewer Vancouverites obese than residents of any other part of Canada (Navaneelan and Janz 2014)?

We’ve discussed the contributions of the nutrition transition and the rise of industrialized agriculture to expanding waistlines, but some researchers also point to a problem closer to home: the food environment. Dr. Kelly Brownell, former director of the Yale Rudd Center on Obesity Policy, and clinical psychologist Katherine Horgen have argued that our food environments have become “toxic” — that is, the proliferation of convenience stores and fast food restaurants, coupled with a decline in healthier options, has created neighborhoods whose residents find it far easier to consume happy meals than balanced diets (Brownell and Horgen 2004). Other public health researchers have tied the problem to racial and socioeconomic disparities in diet-related health (Morland, Wing and Diez-Roux 2002; Morland 2014).

Taken at a neighborhood level, the term “food environment” is commonly used to refer to all food vendors—from hot dog stands to supermarkets—comprised in the built environment. Some researchers expand that term to include advertising or other factors that might affect a person’s diet. The concept has been adapted to specific cases, like the urban food environment, the home food environment or the school food environment. The school food environment covers a particularly broad array of food system components, including everything from sources of food like cafeterias or vending machines to educational opportunities such as school gardens or teaching kitchens.

With all of these possible levels and so many domains, the food environment becomes quite abstract. How do we measure so broad a concept? UBC researchers have been working on precisely that problem in the context of Vancouver schools; researchers associated with the Think&EatGreen@School Project developed a scoring system to measure the food systems initiatives in schools, finding high levels of gardening and educational initiatives but only preliminary efforts to improve the nutritional quality and environmental sustainability of foods in 33 Vancouver Schools (Black et al 2015).

Studies of the food environment remain contested: most studies are cross sectional and observational, which means that they cannot distinguish correlation and causation (Engler Stringer et al 2014). The few studies that have involved “natural experiments”, such as the opening of a new grocery store, have produced mixed results (Elbel et al 2015; Cummins, Flint and Matthews 2014). We are still learning how to measure food environments rigorously and how to evaluate their impacts on diet-related health—but given the global magnitude of the obesity epidemic, food environments seem worthy of such careful study. A recent study in The Lancet found that, although obesity rates in developed countries are largely stabilizing, there was not a single country that could be deemed a “success story” in reducing obesity rates (Ng et al 2014). If food environments do shape our diets, they could be key to the interventions researchers and public health practitioners are so desperately seeking.

References

• Black J et al (2015). Sustainability and public health nutrition at school: assessing the integration of healthy and environmentally sustainable food initiatives in Vancouver schools. Public Health Nutrition, 18(3): 2379-2391.
• Brownell and Horgen (2004). Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Contemporary Books.
• Cummins S, Flint E, Matthews SA (2014). New neighborhood grocery store increased awareness of food access but did not alter dietary habits or obesity. Health Affairs, 33(2):283-291.
• Elbel B, Moran A, Dixon LB, Kiszko K, Cantor J, Abrams C, Mijanovich T (2015). Assessment of a government-subsidized supermarket in a high-need area on household food availability and children’s dietary intakes. Public Health Nutrition, 18(15): 2881-2890.
• Engler-Stringer R, Le H, Gerrard A, Muhajarine N (2014). The community and consumer food environment and children’s diet: a systematic review. BMC Public Heatlh, 14:522.
• Morland KB (2014). Local Food Environments: Food Access in America. Boca Raton, Fl: CRC Press.
• Morland KB, Wing S, Diez-Roux AV (2002). The contextual effect of the local food environment on residents’ diets: the atherosclerosis risk in communities study. American Journal of Public Health, 92(11):1761-1768.
• Navaneelan T and Janz T (2014). Adjusting the scales: Obesity in the Canadian population after adjusting for respondent bias. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 82-624-X. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-624-x/2014001/article/11922-eng.htm
• Ng et al (2014). Global, regional and national prevalence of overweight and obesity in children and adults 1980-2013: A systematic analysis. The Lancet, 384(9945):766-781.
• Starky S (2005). The obesity epidemic in Canada. Parliament of Canada, PRB 05-11E. http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/LOP/ResearchPublications/prb0511-e.htm

Tutorial Session

In your tutorial session, one group will be responsible for presenting and facilitating a discussion on the week’s readings. See course assignment description for presentation requirements.

Additional Material

• Scholarly Article - Glanz, K. et al. (2005). Healthy nutrition environments: concepts and measures. American Journal of Health Promotion. 19(5): 330-333.

This article provides a concise (3 pages!) overview of how community-level food environments (like schools) are (and have been) conceptualized. This model from Glanz, et al (2005) is a starting point for conceptualizing nutrition environment variables that are believed to be related to eating behaviours. Schools are just one site of many that contain various environmental variables that impact eating behaviours. The school food environment assessment you will be conducting later this term using SFEAT aims to measure the environmental variables within schools that are hypothesised to impact eating behaviours through a series of quantitative and qualitative measures.

• KidsSkan (2011). Study examines Saskatoon’s food environment

This short video briefly describes how researchers are going about examining the food environment in Saskatoon and the relationship with what people ultimately eat.

• South LA’s food environment (2011)

A newsclip that clearly discusses the way a local food environment is associated with health outcomes.