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The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research
BACKGROUND: The food stores within residential environments are increasingly investigated as a possible mechanism driving food behaviours and health outcomes. Whilst increased emphasis is being placed on the type of study designs used and how we measure the outcomes, surprisingly little attention ge...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7507725/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32957988 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12966-020-01019-1 |
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author | Thornton, Lukar E. Lamb, Karen E. White, Simon R. |
author_facet | Thornton, Lukar E. Lamb, Karen E. White, Simon R. |
author_sort | Thornton, Lukar E. |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: The food stores within residential environments are increasingly investigated as a possible mechanism driving food behaviours and health outcomes. Whilst increased emphasis is being placed on the type of study designs used and how we measure the outcomes, surprisingly little attention gets diverted to the measures of the food environment beyond calls for standardised approaches for food store coding and geographic scales of exposure. Food environments are a challenging concept to measure and model and the use of ratio and proportion measures are becoming more common in food environment research. Whilst these are seemingly an advance on single store type indicators, such as simply counting the number of supermarkets or fast food restaurants present, they have several limitations that do not appear to have been fully considered. MAIN BODY: In this article we report on five issues related to the use of ratio and proportion food environment measures: 1) binary categorisation of food stores; 2) whether they truly reflect a more or less healthy food environment; 3) issues with these measures not reflecting the quantity of food stores; 4) difficulties when no stores are present; and 5) complications in statistical treatment and interpretation of ratio and proportion measures. Each of these issues are underappreciated in the literature to date and highlight that ratio and proportion measures need to be treated with caution. CONCLUSION: Calls for the broader adoption of relative food environment measures may be misguided. Whilst we should continue to search for better ways to represent the complexity of food environments, ratio and proportion measures are unlikely to be the answer. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7507725 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-75077252020-09-23 The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research Thornton, Lukar E. Lamb, Karen E. White, Simon R. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act Debate BACKGROUND: The food stores within residential environments are increasingly investigated as a possible mechanism driving food behaviours and health outcomes. Whilst increased emphasis is being placed on the type of study designs used and how we measure the outcomes, surprisingly little attention gets diverted to the measures of the food environment beyond calls for standardised approaches for food store coding and geographic scales of exposure. Food environments are a challenging concept to measure and model and the use of ratio and proportion measures are becoming more common in food environment research. Whilst these are seemingly an advance on single store type indicators, such as simply counting the number of supermarkets or fast food restaurants present, they have several limitations that do not appear to have been fully considered. MAIN BODY: In this article we report on five issues related to the use of ratio and proportion food environment measures: 1) binary categorisation of food stores; 2) whether they truly reflect a more or less healthy food environment; 3) issues with these measures not reflecting the quantity of food stores; 4) difficulties when no stores are present; and 5) complications in statistical treatment and interpretation of ratio and proportion measures. Each of these issues are underappreciated in the literature to date and highlight that ratio and proportion measures need to be treated with caution. CONCLUSION: Calls for the broader adoption of relative food environment measures may be misguided. Whilst we should continue to search for better ways to represent the complexity of food environments, ratio and proportion measures are unlikely to be the answer. BioMed Central 2020-09-21 /pmc/articles/PMC7507725/ /pubmed/32957988 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12966-020-01019-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Debate Thornton, Lukar E. Lamb, Karen E. White, Simon R. The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research |
title | The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research |
title_full | The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research |
title_fullStr | The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research |
title_full_unstemmed | The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research |
title_short | The use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research |
title_sort | use and misuse of ratio and proportion exposure measures in food environment research |
topic | Debate |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7507725/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32957988 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12966-020-01019-1 |
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