What is the food environment and how does it influence people’s food choice?

Obesity is a complex public health challenge driven by a mixture of the social, economic, biological and environmental factors that shape our lives and individual behaviours. There are multiple factors that influence people’s choices and behaviours within the environment where we live, work and play (1).

At its simplest level, obesity is caused by a change in energy balance due to consuming more calories than the body needs, which leads to excess energy intake and results in excess weight gain over time. (2). However, we know that obesity is complex, with a broad range of drivers and influences.

The food environment broadly refers to ‘the opportunity to obtain food’ and has been defined as the collective structural, environmental, socio-cultural, economic and policy surroundings, opportunities and conditions that influence people’s food choices ((3), (4), (5), (6)). Environmental factors that influence health are referred to as wider determinants of health.

Food choice is recognised as complex and multifaceted, influenced by a range of factors including a person’s preferences, cultural background, upbringing, age and income. The environment, or more specifically, the food environment, can also influence people’s dietary behaviour through shaping their food and beverage options. Examples of this include the availability, affordability and accessibility of healthier and less healthy food options, as well as food advertising and marketing. The Royal Society of Public Health believes we need to make sure that people are empowered to make the healthy choices when they want, rather than funnelled in a particular direction by external forces (7).

The Foresight Report Obesity System Map (1) provides a comprehensive view of the broad environmental causes of obesity, including the wider environmental, behavioural, biological, societal and cultural factors, and how these factors interact. The map highlights that the solutions to addressing obesity are everyone’s business, and there is a requirement for a broad range of actions at a global, national and local level to support people to achieve a healthier weight.

The Foresight Report highlighted that many of the factors causing obesity are the wider determinants of health (1).
Factors including income, housing, education, access to space, in addition to the factors set out above, all impact on whether people can eat healthily. It follows that the drivers of obesity are not felt equally across the population; this and the impact of the wider determinants of health mean that there are significant inequalities in the levels of overweight and obesity, as we will cover in Step 1.8.

Consumer insight into the experience during and post COVID-19 pandemic have shown changes in behaviour relating to the food environment ((8), (9)). Consumers had increased access to takeaways during the pandemic and sustained this behaviour in post-pandemic periods (10). Research has also shown positive changes to cooking and food resilience (11).