Monitoring the availability of healthy and unhealthy foods and non-alcoholic beverages in community and consumer retail food environments globally

Abstract

Monitoring the availability of healthy and unhealthy foods and non-alcoholic Monitoring the availability of healthy and unhealthy foods and non-alcoholic beverages in community and consumer retail food environments globally beverages in community and consumer retail food environments globally Abstract Abstract Retail food environments are increasingly considered influential in determining dietary behaviours and health outcomes. We reviewed the available evidence on associations between community (type, availability and accessibility of food outlets) and consumer (product availability, prices, promotions and nutritional quality within stores) food environments and dietary outcomes in order to develop an evidencebased framework for monitoring the availability of healthy and unhealthy foods and non-alcoholic beverages in retail food environments. Current evidence is suggestive of an association between community and consumer food environments and dietary outcomes; however, substantial heterogeneity in study designs, methods and measurement tools makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions. The use of standardized tools to monitor local food environments within and across countries may help to validate this relationship. We propose a step-wise framework to monitor and benchmark community and consumer retail food environments that can be used to assess density of healthy and unhealthy food outlets; measure proximity of healthy and unhealthy food outlets to homes/schools; evaluate availability of healthy and unhealthy foods in-store; compare food environments over time and between regions and countries; evaluate compliance with local policies, guidelines or voluntary codes of practice; and determine the impact of changes to retail food environments on health outcomes, such as obesity.

Food labelling, food retail availability and food pricing – moving from research to action?

“…As research on the consumer retail food environment continues, investigators need to grapple with achieving the right balance between the creation of innovative tools that improve our ability to capture relevant aspects of the food environment or best suit their study aims v. the use of standardized instruments that allow for easier comparisons across places and over time. When making these decisions, researchers may find a recently proposed step-wise framework to monitor local food environments within and across countries useful (35) .…”

Towards comprehensive global monitoring of food environments and policies to reduce diet-related non-communicable diseases

“…Current evidence is suggestive of an association between retail food environments and dietary outcomes; however, substantial heterogeneity in study designs, methods and measurement tools makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions (6,11) . Studies in the current issue reflect this heterogeneity.…”

“…INFORMAS offers standardized stepwise approaches to monitor several key aspects of food environments transformable by government and private-sector policies and actions. These include food composition (34) , food labelling (35) , exposure of children to unhealthy food promotion (36) , food provision in different settings (37) , food availability in communities (11) , prices and affordability of healthy v. less healthy diets (38) , and the impacts of trade and investment agreements on food environments (39) . In addition to monitoring key aspects of food environments, INFORMAS has proposed a Government Healthy Food Environment Policy Index (Food-EPI) to assess government policies and actions towards good practice (40) .…”

Exploring sales data during a healthy corner store intervention in Toronto: the Food Retail Environments Shaping Health (FRESH) project

“…[1][2][3][4] Such interventions aim to support healthier dietary behaviours by improving access to and availability of affordable, nutritious food options in the community and consumer nutrition environments. 5,6 Food stores are especially important sites for healthy eating interventions, since over 70 cents of every household food dollar is spent in stores (as opposed to restaurants). 7 Food sales data have been proposed as valuable, objective, cost-efficient and unobtrusive measures of diet-related behaviour that place no burden on individual participants.…”

“…8 Store sales data (e.g. directly collected checkout scanner data, commercially available data sets and grocery receipts) have been used to monitor the effectiveness of interventions in a variety of types of retail food stores, [9][10][11][12] including a number of recent small-store studies. [13][14][15][16][17] Together, these studies suggest that sales data can actually be used in the design of retail food interventions.…”