Abstract

The characteristics of food environments people are exposed to, such as the density of fast food (FF) outlets, can impact their diet and risk for diet-related chronic disease. Previous studies examining the relationship between food environments and nutritional health have produced mixed findings, potentially due to the predominant focus on static food environments around people’s homes. As smartphone ownership increases, large-scale data on human mobility (i.e., smartphone geolocations) represents a promising resource for studying dynamic food environments that people have access to and visit as they move throughout their day. This study investigates whether mobility data provides meaningful indicators of diet, measured as FF intake, and diet-related disease, evaluating its usefulness for food environment research. Using a mobility dataset consisting of 14.5 million visits to geolocated food outlets in Los …

Date

November 15, 2023

Authors

Abigail L Horn, Brooke M Bell, Bernardo García Bulle Bueno, Mohsen Bahrami, Burçin Bozkaya, Yan Cui, John P Wilson, Alex Pentland, Esteban Moro, Kayla De la Haye

Journal

NPJ Digital Medicine

Volume

6

Issue

1

Pages

208

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group UK