Kim Raine, PhD, RD, John C. Spence, PhD, John Church , PhD, MA, Normand Boulé, PhD, Linda Slater, MLiS, Josh Marko, MPH, Karyn Gibbons , MPH. State of the Evidence Review on Urban Health – Healthy Weights.

The rapid rise in the prevalence of obesity in Canada over the past two decades has led to a sense of urgency from practitioners and policy-makers for more effective approaches to obesity prevention and control. Increasingly, but perhaps intuitively, public health researchers and decision-makers have attributed the emerging obesity epidemic to rapid changes in social and physical environments, and have called for a broader multi-level approach to prevention. Such an approach addresses policy and environmental facilitators of obesity, including (but not limited to) facilitators of obesogenic (“obesity promoting”) behaviours (i.e., poor diet and sedentary behaviour). Several prominent researchers make compelling arguments that the environment determines the prevalence of obesity in a population, and broad environmental interventions should be more effective in reducing the population burden of obesity. Yet, very little research is available on environmental influences on obesity, and that which is known is inferred from epidemiological and cultural observations. To date, evidence on the changing structures of urban environments and implications for obesity rates has not been subject to a systematic review. The evidence base for the process and outcomes of implementing effective environmental interventions is even less well delineated. It is these substantial gaps in knowledge synthesis that will be addressed by the proposed State of the Evidence review.