Benchmarking Food Environments

Good food and nutrition are essential to promoting the health of children and youth.

Healthy eating promotes child growth and development, learning and even the prevention of diet-related chronic diseases once believed to affect only adults, such as obesity, certain cancers, and Type 2 Diabetes (World Health Organization, 2016). Furthermore, the 2019 Global Burden of Disease data indicate that dietary risks rank second only to tobacco as contributors to premature mortality in Canada (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2019).

Contrary to popular opinion, healthy eating is more than an individual choice and is influenced by the food environments in which we live. While policy makers have only just begun to formulate public policy responses, we model our work on previous successes in cancer prevention: the use of policy for tobacco control. Benchmarking to catalyze policy development for improving food environments holds potential to change cultural norms and increase healthy eating. Members of our team have extended the idea of benchmarking to the nutritional realm through developing Alberta’s Nutrition Report Card on Food Environments for Children and Youth (NRC). Indicators in five environments must: relate to policies or actions with potential to influence food environments, be policy-relevant and amenable to government influence, be feasible targets for data collection, and be supported by evidence of effectiveness and population-level impact (i.e. peer-reviewed studies), while highlighting opportunities for intervention and research.

Three main project goals of this five-year Alberta Innovates funded integrated research, training and knowledge translation collaborative project are to:

1. Develop the provincial Alberta Nutrition Report Card (NRC), an annual assessment of how Alberta’s food environments and nutrition policies either support or create barriers to improving children’s eating practices and body weights.
2. Assess the outcome and impact of the annual NRC on: decision-maker and public perceptions through the provincial, biennial Chronic Disease Prevention Survey; policy development through Nutrition Policy Scans (2017 and 2021); and prevalence of eating practices and childhood overweight/obesity.
3. Develop and assess the process, outcomes and impact of engaging local communities in monitoring their own food environments through the development of Mini Nutrition Report Cards working with communities across Alberta collecting data on community-relevant benchmarks.

The NRC serves as a tool for all levels of government and NGOs, researchers, health professionals, corporations, and foundations to support and develop enhanced programming and policies, as well as to identify areas that require further action.

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