Public health nutrition: where does the environment fit?
Abstract:
At a population-level, Canadians' diet quality is less than optimal to promote health. Historically, public health nutrition professionals have focused on nutrition education campaigns to promote healthy diets. More recently, Canadian governments in many jurisdictions have begun to recognize the importance of the food environment - the settings and contexts in which Canadians purchase and consume foods and beverages - in determining nutritional health. In the absence of solid evidence on the health impacts of food environment interventions, governments and civil society organizations have begun to act on the food environment in ways that aim to improve population nutrition. This presentation will provide a brief overview of public health nutrition in Canada, with a focus on efforts made at the federal, provincial, and municipal level to improve the nutritional quality of the food environment. It will question the place of public health nutrition research within an overall framework of food systems research, and will aim to highlight areas of collaboration between the two.