Today’s double cheeseburger is tomorrow’s weight problem, and that’s why your phone has become a weapon in the conflict between public health and private enterprise.
Researchers from the University of Southern California and MIT are using large-scale mobility data to follow people’s eating behaviors throughout the day, to understand how food choice is influenced by what’s accessible, available, and affordable.
This Big Data-derived knowledge can help health officials find solutions for people who eat poorly not because of any moral failing, but rather because they live in so-called “food deserts,” where there’s little access to healthy, affordable food, and “food swamps,” where what’s available might as well be muck.
“At face value, we haven’t really blown anyone’s mind with the finding that if you go more to fast-food outlets, you are eating more fast food,” Abigail Horn, who specializes in problems with food systems and nutrition for USC’s Information Science Institute, told The Daily Beast. “The more interesting finding is that when you look at health outcomes, people who live in neighborhoods with higher rates of fast-food outlet visits have significantly higher rates of obesity and diabetes.”
But at the same time, other experts said, the fast-food outlets whose greasy, salty offerings are fattening up Americans already use personal data collection as part of their efforts to market more aggressively to consumers—and a primary target may be those least resistant to it.
Added Horn: “If you look at the funding in public health and then the funding in the food industry, it’s not a fair game.”