Recipients

Obesity and general health are dependent on access to healthy food at the neighbourhood level, sometimes called the food environment. Dr. Rachel Engler-Stringer is comparing neighbourhoods with and without positive food environment characteristics. She’s asking children and their caregivers how they perceive the availability, accessibility and quality of food in their home neighbourhoods and in Saskatoon as a whole.

By conducting individual interviews with children aged 10 to 13 years and their caregivers, and documenting their photos, Dr. Engler-Stringer plans to increase understanding about how caregivers and children perceive their food environments and what this means for their eating behaviours. She is exploring such areas as the type and location of food stores, their accessibility, and the availability of healthy food options.

The ultimate goal of Dr. Engler-Stringer in gathering this information on children and their caregivers living within particular neighbourhoods in Saskatoon, is to link this information to other research on diet and obesity. She believes such a link will support the development of improvements to health policy and practice, and provide information for other research aimed at benefiting nutrition and health of children and their families.

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