Leveraging Human Mobility Data to Understand Food Behaviors and Dietary Health Outcomes: A Broad-Scale National Study

Keywords: human mobility, food environment, dietary health, SafeGraph, GIS
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The food environment plays a crucial role in shaping how people live and maintain an active, healthy lifestyle. Over the past two decades, research on the food environment has primarily focused on employing various spatial models to approximate the health effects of food retailers. One often-overlooked aspect of these models is food-related human mobility, referring to how people navigate and interact with the food environment to make food choices. This paper leverages a broad-scale human mobility dataset (i.e., SafeGraph) that captures aggregated visit records to food retailers across the US over two years. Using this data, the paper develops a novel Activity-Based Food Environment Index (AFEI), representing the healthiness of food behaviors at the census tract level. The results show significant associations between the AFEI and the prevalence of multiple cardiometabolic diseases (e.g., obesity, type II diabetes, and cardiovascular disease). This study is among the first to use large-scale human mobility data to examine food behaviors nationwide and can offer insights for alternative intervention strategies, such as improving healthy food distribution and enhancing transportation infrastructure, in communities facing food injustice.