What number of fast-food joints do you come throughout all through your day and what does that should do together with your well being? So much, says Abigail Horn, a lead scientist at USC’s Data Sciences Institute (ISI).
Horn led a multidisciplinary staff that included researchers from three USC faculties (Viterbi College of Engineering; Dornsife School of Letters, Arts and Sciences; and Keck College of Medication), MIT, and Sabancı College in Turkey; and labored in collaboration with the LA County Division of Public Well being. They got down to verify whether or not smartphone mobility (i.e., location) information might present a technique to measure individuals’s individually-experienced dynamic meals environments, at scale throughout massive and various populations and various bodily environments.
The query was: can we use mobility information to measure individuals’s visits to meals retailers? As a result of that is a superb proxy for consuming meals at that outlet. After which, can we go a step additional to see whether or not visits to meals retailers noticed within the mobility information are predictive of individuals’s dietary illness charges?”
Abigail Horn, lead scientist at USC’s Data Sciences Institute
Location, location, location
“It is effectively established that the bodily atmosphere can affect individuals’s consuming choices and due to this fact their diet-related well being outcomes, however what we do not know is the extent to which that’s true,” stated Horn, who’s a Analysis Assistant Professor within the Daniel J. Epstein Division of Industrial and Techniques Engineering on the USC Viterbi College of Engineering.
Bodily meals environments are the precise areas the place individuals purchase meals. “The meals retailers of their neighborhood, or round their office, or any location alongside their day by day path. Issues like grocery shops, eating places, or nook markets,” defined Horn.
These environments have been proven to affect individuals’s diets and due to this fact well being outcomes – together with diet-related ailments – in a number of methods. First, stated Horn, “When individuals have low bodily entry to wholesome meals, that may induce unhealthy selections out of comfort or necessity.” And second, “Individuals might be cued by meals environments. So, for instance, if all through your day you are seeing fast-food retailers over and over, that may cue or set off sure behaviors” (i.e., consuming extra quick meals).
There are a selection of research individuals’s residence neighborhood meals environments and associating these with meals selections and diet-related ailments. However the findings have been blended, as have the outcomes of public well being initiatives which have targeted on residence neighborhood meals environments.
Horn defined, “Within the final decade or so, over a billion {dollars} have been invested in public well being interventions in residence meals environments. This might imply constructing a grocery retailer in a meals desert [a home neighborhood with limited access to nutritious food] or stocking the nook shops in that neighborhood with contemporary fruit and greens.” However, she continued, “There’s been no measurable affect in rising individuals’s wholesome meals purchases or well being outcomes. So what is going on on right here?”
Kayla de la Haye is likely one of the members of the analysis staff who might assist reply that query. De la Haye is the Director of the Institute for Meals System Fairness at USC Dornsife Heart for Financial Analysis, and has a background in public well being, vitamin, and psychology. “Certainly one of my roles on this analysis was to carry experience in how individuals make choices about what to eat, and the implications of meals environments that inundate individuals with unhealthy choices and put them in danger for a lot of diet-related ailments like weight problems and diabetes.”
Wanting past the neighborhood market
De la Haye has labored with households throughout LA – from Lancaster to LA’s eastside – serving to them with methods to keep away from unhealthy meals and undertake more healthy consuming habits. She stated, “So I introduced this real-world information of the challenges Angelenos face in consuming a nutritious diet to our analysis challenge.”
The staff knew from their very own experiences, and from the experiences of households they’ve labored with in wholesome consuming applications, that folks do not simply eat of their residence neighborhood. However they wanted the info to show this on the inhabitants scale. Horn stated, “We thought that the shortage of information exhibiting all the locations the place individuals really go to eat and the place they’re spending probably the most time would possibly clarify why we’re not seeing associations between the house neighborhood meals atmosphere and folks’s food regimen and well being outcomes.”
In order that they turned to smartphones for the info.
For many of us, our smartphone is all the time monitoring our location, and we most likely share that information with a number of apps. Location information corporations mixture this information – known as “mobility information” – and promote it for promoting. However more and more, it’s being made obtainable for analysis, akin to by Spectus.ai by way of their Social Impression Program, by way of which the info for this examine was obtained.
Esteban Moro led the staff at MIT that will assist entry and analyze this information. Moro, a Analysis Scientist at MIT Connection Science stated, “Our group has quite a lot of expertise analyzing and utilizing mobility information in issues like segregation, transportation, city planning, and business exercise. We’re consultants in analyzing massive datasets of human habits and remodeling them into insightful instruments for city issues. So, our foremost function on this analysis was to supply and analyze population-wide mobility information about meals consumption.”
Bringing collectively all the info
Utilizing census block information for Los Angeles County to point residence neighborhoods, and massive mobility information to trace day by day trajectories, the researchers might see all the proximity – the “exposures” – individuals must meals retailers all through their days.
The staff seemed particularly at fast-food retailers as a result of quick meals is usually consumed and strongly linked with illness threat. Utilizing “focal point” information they recognized fast-food retailers inside LA County. To herald the well being piece of the puzzle, they accessed survey information from the LA County Well being Division.
“The Los Angeles County Well being Division does a well being survey of the LA inhabitants each three years. We fashioned a collaboration with them, they usually had been capable of share anonymized particular person degree information with us on socio-demographics, weight problems charges, diabetes charges, and really importantly, fast-food consumption frequency for a consultant pattern of the LA inhabitants,” stated Horn.
By analyzing the info, the researchers confirmed that your property neighborhood issues in terms of your threat of diet-related illness, however so does your commute, the trail you are taking to run your day by day errands, the way you get from level A to level B and all the best way to level Z in your day, and what these factors are.
The outcomes?
“We all know there’s a relationship between fast-food outlet visits and fast-food consumption, in addition to between fast-food consumption and diet-related ailments, however wow, this information supply does a extremely good job of capturing that!” stated Horn.
Moro elaborated, “Essentially the most stunning result’s that mobility information works like a “trustworthy sign,” i.e., visits to fast-food retailers had been a greater predictor of people’ weight problems and diabetes than their self-reported fast-food consumption, controlling for different recognized dangers.”
De la Haye emphasised, “This work demonstrates that large-scale mobility information is in actual fact a beneficial indicator of the place and what individuals eat, and their threat for diet-related illness.”
Why is that this so important?
De la Haye defined, “Measuring what individuals eat is absolutely tough. The truth is, many massive public well being surveys and surveillance instruments have stopped asking individuals about their meals consumption as a result of the info is usually unreliable (partially as a result of individuals typically overlook the main points of what they ate, and likewise as a result of they do not all the time wish to inform researchers about their much less wholesome meals selections). So, this offers us a brand new instrument to trace dietary patterns, like consuming quick meals, for big populations akin to residents of cities, counties, or the whole nation.”
What’s subsequent?
“What I am enthusiastic about as a researcher,” stated Horn, “is that this opens up mobility information for all types of investigations into the meals atmosphere. Issues like: the place are individuals getting meals at completely different instances of day? Who’re these individuals? When are they most affected by the choices obtainable (or unavailable) to them? We will actually examine this with large mobility information, as a result of it permits us to take a look at consuming behaviors in massive and new dimensions: at scale throughout the inhabitants, throughout various inhabitants teams, various environmental environment, and over lengthy durations of time.”
De la Haye underscores the significance of this, “information on inhabitants dietary patterns is a strong instrument wanted to make public well being applications and insurance policies, and in the end cut back well being dangers from one of many main causes of sickness and dying within the U.S.: unhealthy diets.”
Supply:
College of Southern California
Journal reference:
Horn, A. L., et al. (2023). Inhabitants mobility information supplies significant indicators of quick meals consumption and diet-related ailments in various populations. Npj Digital Medication. doi.org/10.1038/s41746-023-00949-x.
