Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Michael Widener, University of Toronto

; ,

Description:

There is an increasing interest in understanding urban food environment and the associations between urban food environment and health. Urban food environment includes accessibility to retail food stores, restaurants, and other food sources, and racial, socioeconomic, and cultural disparities to access these food sources; it also includes the availability, quality, price, labelling, and advertising of food products. With the continuous advances in theory, data and modeling technique, research in urban food environment and the related health impacts have seen great progress. However, there are some uncertainties and challenging issues in measuring urban food environments and their relationship with health outcomes. These challenges and uncertainties include, but not limited to:
• Innovative methods on geographic accessibility to food outlets, including activity space spatio-temporal models, etc. to understand the role of food environment exposure on the health across space and time.
• Novel methods on measuring socioeconomic, cultural, racial/ethnic disparities to food outlets.
• Evaluating consumer food environment (e.g., food availability, prices, quality, and advertising) in deprived vs. non-deprived communities.
• Individual level research of urban food environment and health outcome
• Longitudinal and experimental/quasi-experimental research designs in urban food environment and health outcome.
• The uncertainties in measuring urban food environments and its relationship with health.
• How do land use/cover or natural disasters (such as tornadoes) affect local urban food environment (e.g., farmers’ markets closure) and further affect people’s health.
• How are food shopping and purchasing decisions related to the urban food environments and health.
• Using big data (such as Twitter and Weibo) to describe and understand people’s eating habits and behaviors, as well as attitude towards healthy eating in urban setting.
• How do behavioral change and weight loss interventions contribute to changes in the food environment and health, as well as the intervention effectiveness.
• Targeting policy and interventions for urban food environment management to reduce health inequities.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda