“Food Environments and Obesity – Neighbourhood or Nation?”

FOOD FOR TALK presents…
“Food Environments and Obesity – Neighbourhood or Nation?”
Steven Cummins, MRC Fellow, Department of Geography, Queen Mary University of London; Visiting Scholar, School of Public Health, University of Michigan
Friday, April 7
2:00-4:00, University of Toronto, University College Room 163

Steve is a geographer with training in epidemiology and public health (PhD, MRC Social & Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, 2001; MSc in Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2004). He has held research posts in a variety of academic disciplines including public health, urban studies and geography, and is currently MRC Special Training Fellow in the Department of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London.
He is also Visiting Fellow at the Center for Social Epidemiology & Population Health at the University of Michigan, where he is based until the end of April 2006.
In this talk, Steve will be discussing the relation between environments (broadly defined) and obesity. Individually focused dietary interventions attempting to reduce obesity have met with limited success, with the rapid and widespread increasing prevalence of obesity only partially explained by individual-level psychological and social factors associated with diet. Such critiques have led to a new focus on the ‘environmental’ exposures that
encourage excessive food intake and discourage physical activity. Steve will survey the international evidence on the effect of the neighbourhood ‘food environment’ on diet and attempt to draw out some of the key trends, promises and pitfalls of current research in this area from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Aspects of these trends will be illustrated by some of his recent work undertaken in the UK and USA.
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‘Food for Talk’ provides a place for conversations to take place between people who work with communities, government and universities to explore the emerging and challenging issues around food security, agricultural transformation, and local food alternatives/networks. This series is jointly sponsored by the Centre for Urban Health Initiatives, York University Faculty of Environmental Studies, the Ryerson Centre for Studies
in Food Security, and the Toronto Food Policy Council.