Food-Environment Mapping and Adolescent Dietary Decision Making

Jacob C. Seidell

Food-Environment Mapping and Adolescent Dietary Decision Making

Author(s)	Prof. Jacob C. Seidell
Country	United States
Abstract	Adolescent dietary decision making occurs within spatial, household, social, and commercial environments that shape which foods are visible, accessible, convenient, affordable, and socially acceptable at the moment of choice. Geographic food-environment mapping can identify concentrations of supermarkets, fresh-food retailers, convenience stores, fast-food establishments, school food outlets, and other sources encountered around homes, schools, and routine travel routes. Nevertheless, geographic proximity alone cannot establish what an adolescent will consume because food choice is also influenced by home availability, taste, peer behavior, marketing exposure, time constraints, and purchasing autonomy. The present study develops a Food-Environment Mapping and Dietary Decision Intelligence Framework that combines a spatially derived Food-Environment Healthfulness Index with home healthy-food support, unhealthy food-marketing pressure, and peer convenience pressure. Because no original adolescent survey, GIS, purchasing, or dietary dataset was supplied, the investigation adopts an explicitly simulation-based methodology. A synthetic sample of 450 hypothetical adolescents was generated for methodological demonstration. Mean Healthy Dietary Decision Scores increased from 2.08 in low-healthfulness mapped environments to 2.63 in mixed environments and 3.11 in high-healthfulness environments. Multiple regression produced a positive association for Food-Environment Healthfulness (B = 0.021) and Home Healthy-Food Support (B = 0.283), whereas Unhealthy Marketing Pressure (B = −0.185) and Peer Convenience Pressure (B = −0.133) showed negative simulated relationships. The model explained 59.2% of synthetic outcome variation. The analysis does not treat these coefficients as empirical population estimates. Instead, it demonstrates how spatial food information can be converted into decision-oriented public-health intelligence while preserving the distinction between environmental exposure and individual behavior. The proposed approach may support targeted school nutrition programs, healthier retail interventions, route-based food-environment planning, adolescent participatory mapping, and equity-sensitive community nutrition policy.
Keywords	adolescent nutrition, food environment, GIS mapping, dietary decision making, school food environment, food marketing, home food environment, healthy food access
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 4, Issue 4, July-August 2023
Published On	2023-07-21

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Food-Environment Mapping and Adolescent Dietary Decision Making

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