Welcome back to the Barbell Medicine Podcast. I'm Dr. Jordan Figenbaum. I hope you've had a

great week so far. In today's podcast I wanted to talk about one of the biggest

factors that has changed nutrition all over the world, the food

environment. All right, so what is the food environment? The idea of an

organism's food environment originated from the field of ecology, describing the food

chain for various species of animals. In humans, however, the term food environment came into

use in the 1970s, referring to not only the food on hand, but also its affordability, convenience,

promotion, and quality for an individual or society. In simple terms, the food

environment represents what's available to eat, how desirable a food is, and how easy or hard it is to obtain it.

Now the food environment is scalable, sometimes referring to the nutrition environment

of an individual's home, school, or workplace, and other times describing the community's grocery stores, restaurants, and so on.

By convention, neighborhood food environments are limited to about a one mile radius or 20 minute

walk from home, school, or the workplace. But in addition to changes in the local food

environment or neighborhood food environment, food delivery services and

apps have dramatically expanded the food environment for many. For example,

digital orders have grown into a nearly a $30 billion a year

industry in the United States with nearly two-thirds of Americans using at least

one food delivery platform. As we'll see, the rapid and widespread uptake of food delivery services has likely had a large impact on what and how much people eat.

Over the last 50 years, the food environment has changed in many ways, From the increased availability of tasty, cheap, high calorie

processed foods to the larger portion sizes and greater number of meals being consumed

away from home, people are eating much differently than they used to.

Interestingly, the changes to the food environment seem to coincide with the onset

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