Oral

There is renewed interest in improving equity and accessibility to healthy foods in all communities, since where we live, learn, work and play has a tremendous influence on what we eat and do. As a consequence, greater emphasis is now focusing on the community food environment and ways to improve accessibility to healthy and affordable foods especially in low-income, disadvantaged communities in order to make healthier choices easier and more sustainable. An important aspect of this process is measuring the community’s food environment and understanding the attributes that support and promote healthy behaviors as well as constraining factors and barriers. This dynamic session highlights work that is being done in several states to assess the food environments of local communities and to understand how the food environment influences the eating behaviors of residents. In this session the speakers will discuss the accuracy of commonly used commercial data to categorize food retailers and models for using GIS systems to in mapping the food environment. We will also examine objective and subjective measures of food access including community members’ perceptions of their access to healthy foods and the influence of racial composition.

Session Objectives: 1. Examine social and racial factors to consider when measuring local food environments. 2. Assess sources of data and their limitations in describing the retail food landscape. 3. Describe factors that contribute to consumers’ perceptions of the accessibility of healthful foods and the interplay of these factors with the actual food environment of the community. 4. Identify and discuss the opportunities and challenges associated with various GIS mapping models.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH)