Grant: Operating Grant

Researchers have been interested in understanding if the environment we live in contributes to the observed rising rates of overweight and obesity in the Canadian population. Whereas most studies until now have looked at the characteristics of the food environment around people's place of residence, none has yet taken into account how and where people move to fulfill their daily activities to better assess the opportunities for food that arise as we are mobile. Research in geography has been trying to improve our consideration of both geographic space and time to understand people's options for mobility and related actual travel behaviour. By mapping the different locations people visit during a day to fulfill their activities, we hope to obtain a more precise measure of the types of food environments they get exposed to. These measures and related models will be used to assess whether the types of food stores we are exposed to in our daily living play a role in what we eat and on how much we weigh.