Evaluating a Food Hub Opening in an Urban Context

 描述(申请人提供)：食物中心是一种新兴的和越来越受欢迎的方法，通过增加获得营养食物来改善饮食，从而减少肥胖趋势。食品中心提供各种各样的健康食品供消费者和其他食品零售商(如街角商店)购买，通常按照以价值为基础的商业模式运营，优先考虑经济发展和社区利益。食品中心在“食品沙漠”社区可能特别有影响力，这些社区接触传统食品零售商的机会有限或没有机会，收入低，肥胖率高。然而，目前还没有证据表明食物中枢对与预防和减少肥胖有关的饮食行为产生影响。这项研究将提供方案和政策相关的证据，以缩小这一差距，方法是利用一个时间敏感的机会，评估一个新成立的食品中心，该中心将于2014年底通过授予社区(而不是研究小组)的两笔独立赠款而建立。新的食品中心将于2015年10月开放，这项快速反应研究将提供在开放前收集基线数据的机会。指导这项研究的中心假设是，食品中心将改善身体和社会获得营养食品的机会，这将改善居住在新食品中心附近的人们的饮食质量、水果和蔬菜消费以及卡路里摄入量。使用带有重复措施的准实验设计，将生活在接受新食品中心的干预社区的主要食品购物者与匹配的对照社区的消费者之间的饮食变化进行比较。饮食变化将在三个时间点(基线和食品中心后12个月和24个月)使用研究营养数据系统进行测量，该系统是评估24小时饮食召回以检查个人水平变化的黄金标准。在每个时间点，都有三次饮食召回 将被收集起来，以提供更准确的估计。这项研究将考察两个社区居民之间三种饮食结果(例如，饮食质量、FV摄入量、卡路里摄入量)的变化，评估心理社会因素对这些变化的解释程度，并将在干预社区的居民中，使用食物中心购物的客观指标来检查食物中心使用与饮食变化之间的剂量-反应关系。此外，这项研究将通过评估新食品中心对更广泛的食品零售环境的影响，为预防或减少肥胖的食品环境干预科学做出贡献。最后，这项研究将通过检查具体的干预组成部分(如健康食品激励、健康食品社区组织者、烹饪俱乐部等)如何有助于实施食品中心干预措施的科学和实践。由社区实施和接受，以及预期和非预期的后果。研究结果将提供证据，说明食物中心干预措施在多大程度上有助于低收入城市社区居民的饮食变化，并将为减少肥胖趋势和不平等提供指导。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Food hubs are an emerging and increasingly popular approach to reduce obesity trends by improving diet through increased access to nutritious foods. Food hubs offer a wide variety of healthy foods for purchase by both consumers and other food retailers (e.g., corner stores), and typically operate on a value-based business model that prioritizes both economic development and community benefit. Food hubs may be particularly impactful in "food desert" communities that have limited or no access to traditional food retailers, are low income, and have high rates of obesity. However, there is currently no evidence of the influence of a food hub on dietary behaviors related to preventing and reducing obesity. This study will provide programmatic and policy-relevant evidence to close this gap by taking advantage of a time-sensitive opportunity to evaluate a newly forming food hub that will be established through two independent grants awarded to the community (not the research team) in late 2014. The new food hub will open in October 2015, and this rapid response study will provide a chance to collect baseline data prior to opening. The central hypothesis guiding this research is that the food hub will improve both physical and social access to nutritious foods, which will improve diet quality, fruit and vegetable consumption, and caloric intake among people living near the new food hub. Using a quasi-experimental design with repeated measures, changes in diet will be compared between primary food shoppers living in the intervention community receiving the new food hub to those in a matched control community. Dietary changes will be measured at three time points (baseline and 12 and 24 months post food hub) using the Nutrition Data System for Research, the gold standard for assessing 24-hour dietary recalls to examine individual-level changes. At each time point, three dietary recalls will be collected to provide more accurate estimates. The study will examine changes in the three diet outcomes (e.g., diet quality, FV consumption, caloric intake) between residents in the two communities, will assess the extent that psychosocial factors explain these changes, and, among residents in the intervention community, will examine the dose-response relationship between food hub use and changes in diet using objective measures of food hub shopping. Additionally, this research will contribute to the science of food environment interventions to prevent or reduce obesity by assessing the impact of the new food hub on the broader food retail environment. Finally, the study will contribute to the science and practice of implementing food hub interventions by examining how the specific intervention components (such as healthy food incentives, healthy food community organizers, cooking clubs, etc.) are implemented and received by the community as well as intended and unintended consequences. Findings will provide evidence about the extent to which food hub interventions contribute to changes in diet among people living in low-income, urban communities, and will offer guidance for reducing obesity trends and inequities.