Nutrition
Whether we eat to live or live to eat, nutrition plays an important role in our lives. Research shows that what we eat affects much more than our weight; nutrition can also influence our immune system, our response to stress, and even the health of our unborn children.
Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are. Those words, written by the 18th-century food connoisseur Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, referred to the pleasures of the table. With obesity on the rise around the world, the words have a different resonance in modern society. In 2005 the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that, worldwide, at least 400 million people were obese. That number is projected to increase to 700 million by 2015, and WHO has referred to obesity as a global health epidemic.
Rates of obesity and overweight have increased dramatically over the past 20 to 25 years. Scientists point out that our genetic makeup has not changed sufficiently over the past quarter-century to provide a biological explanation for this shift. But something else has changed in that time frame: our eating habits. People are eating more, eating different types of food, and eating in different ways.
Society's influence on nutrition
AHFMR Health Senior Scholar Dr. Kim Raine, director of the University of Alberta Centre for Health Promotion Studies, wants to explore the changes in our social environment that have led to these behavioural differences. Her aim is to determine the social and ecological causes of obesity. Some have referred to our society as a "toxic environment" in terms of food choices and availability. Dr. Raine suggests that obesity may be a natural response to this toxicity, but she asks, "What are the factors that have created this environment? What is it in our culture that promotes overconsumption and inactivity as normal behaviour?"
One way Dr. Raine hopes to identify these factors is through a program called POWER (Promotion of Optimal Weights through Ecological Research). The POWER team includes AHFMR investigators Dr. Linda McCargar and Dr. Noreen Willows and an interdisciplinary team that includes physical activity specialists, a political scientist, an anthropologist, and a geographer, who examine the various factors affecting weight from the perspective of their specialties. The initiative also focuses on such vulnerable populations as low-income neighbourhoods, aboriginal communities, and children. "We want to know if these groups have fewer resources to resist the 'toxic environment,'" explains Dr. Raine.
Health promotion is an action-oriented field, says Dr. Raine, so she and her co-investigators don't just want to understand the problem, they also want to help fix it. Their research will lead to recommendations and strategies to promote good nutritional choices and healthy body weight. "The idea is to create a culture where healthy eating, and taking the time to do it, is normal." This may involve such changes as removing soft-drink vending machines from schools, providing health and nutrition education, and making healthy food choices more affordable and accessible.
In our fast-paced, supersized world, these may seem like tiny steps on an uphill road. But Dr. Raine derives hope from the lessons learned in tobacco reduction. Today tobacco is recognized as a highly addictive and dangerous substance, advertising is tightly regulated, access to tobacco for minors is restricted, and smoking is prohibited in many public places. Not so long ago these changes would have been incomprehensible, even offensive to some people. Similarly, even two years ago many would have seen the removal of soft-drink machines from schools as too restrictive, but it's starting to happen.
Obesity is now a societal problem, not an individual issue, Dr. Raine emphasizes. "The idea is slowly becoming more accepted that when this many people are obese, it's not just an issue of lack of willpower."
Mapping the food landscape
In 2004, when he was a master's student at the University of Alberta, Eric Hemphill mapped the locations of fast-food restaurants and supermarkets in Edmonton, then compared his map to census information. He found that lower-income neighbourhoods (those with higher percentages of low-income residents, single parents, renters, and immigrants) had 2.7 times more fast-food outlets than higher-income communities. He also discovered that Edmonton had 761 fast-food outlets and only 61 supermarkets.
For her 2006 master's thesis, Leia Minaker, mapped the food environment on the University of Alberta campus, documenting locations of food outlets, advertising, hours of operation, length of lineups for service, and a number of other factors. She found that burger and doughnut shops were the cheapest sources of calories on campus, and cafeterias the most expensive. A dozen doughnuts was the cheapest food available at $0.18 per 100 calories. A salad cost $9.78 for 100 calories.