A food environment is the "physical presence of food that affects a person’s diet, a person’s proximity to food store locations, the distribution of food stores, food service, and any physical entity by which food may be obtained, or a connected system that allows access to food". The term toxic food environment was coined by

Kelly D. Brownell Kelly David Brownell (born October 31, 1951) is a clinical psychologist and scholar of public health and public policy at Duke University whose work focuses on obesity and food policy. He is a former dean of Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy. ...

in his book, ''Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry'' which describes American culture at the end of the 20th century as one that fosters and promotes obesity and unprecedented food consumption. In the United States, the food environment the citizens are encompassed in makes it far too hard to choose healthy foods, and all too easy to choose unhealthy foods. Some call this food environment "'toxic' because of the way it corrodes healthy lifestyles and promotes obesity". Brownell was a

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

professor and director of the

Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health, formerly named the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, is a non-profit research and public policy organization that promotes solutions to food insecurity, poor diet quality, and weight bias. Loca ...

. He is now director of the World Food Policy Center of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He uses the term “toxic” to describe unparalleled exposure to high-calorie, high-fat, heavily marketed, inexpensive, and readily accessible foods. The toxic environment is the result of ubiquity of unhealthy, processed foods, an increasingly

sedentary lifestyle Sedentary lifestyle is a lifestyle type, in which one is physically inactive and does little or no physical movement and or exercise. A person living a sedentary lifestyle is often sitting or lying down while engaged in an activity like socia ...

in which individuals spend more time watching TV and using computers than they spend exercising, the explosion of fast food restaurants, the enormous growth of portion sizes, the power of food advertising and marketing, and the junk food industry’s takeover of schools by selling unhealthy items in vending machines, cafeterias, and through school fundraisers. A main contributor to the notion of a toxic food environment is the marketing of it. Finding an advertisement that promotes “toxic” is not a difficult task. The Federal Trade Commission found, in 2008, that the food industry spent almost $10 billion per year on marketing food and beverages, including $1.6 billion toward children. Marketing for “toxic” food has infused the consumption of unhealthy, processed food into US culture. Brownell and many of his colleagues attribute the nation’s obesity epidemic to the toxic environment. In 1995, the Institute of Medicine noted that the human gene pool has not undergone any real change over the past several decades when obesity has been on the rise. Therefore, the root of the obesity crisis must lie in the environment—the social and cultural forces that promote an over-abundance of food and eating, and a deficit of physical activity.

References

External links

*{{cite web , title=''Fast food culture serves up super-size Americans'' , url=http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec01/fastfood.html
Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale UniversityRudd Sound Bites, the Rudd Center blog
Food safety

See also

References

Further reading

External links