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From healthy food environments to healthy wellbeing environments: Policy insights from a focused ethnography with low-income parents’ in England
The prevalence of being overweight and suffering from obesity continues to increase across the world. Like several countries across the world, the impact seen in England appears to affect socioeconomically deprived individuals the most. A potential reason behind this disparity is the unhealthy food provisioning environments (FPEs), which would necessitate targeting FPEs through public health policies and interventions. In this study by Isaacs et al. (2022), the authors discuss how FPE-targeting policies can help address the impact on socioeconomically deprived individuals, through defining how the lifestyle of individuals impacts their FPEs, specifically, how socioeconomically deprived families interact with FPEs, using a sample of 60 parents across three different locations (Great Yarmouth, Stoke-on-Trent, and the London Borough of Lewisham). The results demonstrated that FPEs exercise a two-pronged effect, driving socioeconomically deprived families to opt for unhealthy products, while simultaneously assisting several of their needs, for example, social wellbeing. The authors comment that FPE interventions and public policies attempting to address the impacts of obesity should recognize the challenges faced by low-income families, the structure of their FPEs and how they define the way people use them. [NPID: Food provisioning environments, food practice, low-income, inequalities, obesity]
Year: 2022
