2025

Background: Addressing key behavioral risk factors for chronic diseases, such as diet, requires innovative methods to objectively measure dietary patterns and their upstream determinants, notably the food environment. Although GIS techniques have pushed the boundaries by mapping food outlet availability, they often simplify food access dynamics to the vicinity of home addresses, possibly misclassifying neighborhood effects. […]

We investigated associations between neighborhood walkability and physical activity using twins (5477 monozygotic and same-sex dizygotic pairs) as “quasi-experimental” controls of genetic and shared environment (familial) factors that would otherwise confound exposure-outcome associations. Walkability comprised intersection density, population density, and destination accessibility. Outcomes included self-reported weekly minutes of neighborhood walking and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) […]

Background: Outdoor physical activity (PA) is an important component of overall health; however, it is difficult to measure. Passively collected smartphone location data like Google Location History (GLH) present an opportunity to address this issue. Objectives: To evaluate the use of GLH data for measuring outdoor PA. Methods: We collected GLH data for 357 individuals from the Washington […]