Mapping the road to a healthier lifestyle

Dr Amelia Lake, Senior lecturer in Food Science and Nutrition, received the Young Achiever Award 2010 from the Association for the Study of Obesity for her work, which includes the creation of a “foodscape” to define the types of food outlets present in the city and the kinds of food they produce.

The collaborative project between statisticians and nutritionists at Northumbria and Newcastle University is a classification tool that includes every food outlet in Newcastle’s urban environment, taking in every opportunity that people living in the area have to buy food. It divides the city’s food venues into 21 categories, with 77 sub-categories, including restaurants, supermarkets, medical centres, food production services, and department stores.

The “foodscape”  was created using data from Newcastle City Council’s Public Health and Environmental Protection department and commercial business directories, as well as field observations, in order to obtain the most accurate and up-to-date vision of the city’s food landscape. Researchers believe that the tool will aid future research into the food environment and its relationship with rising levels of obesity in the population.

The research, entitled, The Foodscape: Classification and field validation of secondary data sources, is published in this month’s edition of Health & Place journal.

Dr Lake said: “Obesity is the biggest social and health problem we are facing. It will not be solved by a nutritionist alone, which is why a holistic approach is needed in order to truly make an impact in tackling the problem.

“The foodscape we have developed will enable researchers to investigate the types of food that individuals have easiest access to in the surroundings in which they live and work. Food environments are believed to play a significant role in the obesity epidemic and robust research methods are needed to establish which aspects of the food environment are relevant to food choice.

“Our results have shown that data on the food environment must come from a range of directory and departmental sources, including field research, in order to incorporate all food outlets in an area.”

This month sees the publication of an interdisciplinary book which Dr Lake has co-edited with Newcastle University academics Tim Townshend and Seraphim Alvanides. Obesogenic Environments: Complexities, Perception and Objective Measures, is a groundbreaking book because for the first time it takes a multidisciplinary approach to public health. Published by Wiley-Blackwell, it provides a holistic approach to creating healthier environments by bringing together the knowledge of experts with backgrounds in nutrition, policy, environmental sciences, medical sciences, town planning and urban design, transport and geography.

Dr Lake added: “The research shows that it is as much the responsibility of an urban designer as it is a nutritionist to reverse the obesity trend. It’s not just down to individual choices; society has to create an environment where people have healthier options. The current situation is that the unhealthy option is the easy option. We need to reverse that and create environments where healthy food is the easier, affordable and most accessible option.

“It’s not a call for a nanny state; it’s about environmental justice and true choice for consumers.”