The Cohort for Healthy Eating in the Workplace Study
We are recruiting hundreds of Nova Scotian workers to join our cohort study on workplace conditions, food purchasing & diet quality, conducted by the Food Policy Lab (Dalhousie University), with funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Are you a Nova Scotian worker, employed at a large organization & working in-person at least 3 days a week?
We want to hear from you, to help understand how your occupation and workplace conditions affect your food purchasing and diet quality!
Join other Nova Scotian workers in our study and participate in various questionnaires and assessments about your food purchasing, what you eat, & your job conditions, requiring about 5 hours of your time over 24 months. This study does not require changing anything about your daily routine at work or outside of work!
This study is the first of its kind in Canada and your participation matters!
Benefits for participants:
Receive personalized nutritional information to better understand your dietary health
Have a chance to win $500 grocery store giftcards throughout the study
Contribute to new research on workplace food environments & diet quality, to promote healthier eating and workplace wellness across Nova Scotia!
About CHEWS
The Food Policy Lab at Dalhousie University is launching the Cohort for Healthy Eating in the Workplace Study (CHEWS), a workers cohort study that will examine how socioeconomic and workplace factors influence food purchasing and diet quality. CHEWS is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and led by Dr. Catherine L. Mah, Canada Research Chair in Promoting Healthy Populations at the School of Health Administration at Dalhousie University.
Workers spend a significant portion of their waking hours at work. Work may include eating at your workplace, bringing food to your worksite, figuring out how to get food while doing your job, planning meals and snacks around your workload or commute, and interacting (or not!) with your co-workers while you eat. The workplace is an important organizational space through which to understand diet quality, which affects physical as well as mental health.
Our study will collect diet assessments, food purchasing data, sociodemographic data, and more from 400+ Nova Scotian workers over a period of at least 24 months. This research is the first of its kind in Canada, and seeks to expand upon existing literature around workplace food environments, as well as to deepen our collective understandings of occupations, organizations, and workplace conditions as social determinants of health.
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CHEWS has the following research objectives:
Examine dietary intakes and diet quality in a socio-economically diverse occupational cohort of workers at large employer organizations.
Examine the association between workplace dietary intakes and total diet quality, including the mediating or moderating role of the workplace food and social environment.
Describe the nutritional quality of food purchases in this worker cohort.
Explore the role of the workplace food and social environment in the nutritional quality of food purchases.
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CHEWS is a cohort study.
Cohort refers to a type of longitudinal study, meaning it follows a group of people and makes repeated observations over time.
Participants will all be employees at large organizations in Nova Scotia, and will be contacted every 6 months over a period of 24 months to complete various assessments.
Cohort studies are one of the most well known ways of understanding the lives and health of workers.
Cohort studies involving workers were pivotal in the science on social determinants of health. Social determinants are the societal conditions under which we live, work, love, play, and learn, and which have profound roles in our health and wellbeing.
Cohort studies helped contribute to the world’s understanding that a person’s position in an organization or society can affect health independently, over and above biology and physical factors.
Cohort study designs help researchers to understand the health of individuals as well as groups, and can help to produce evidence to inform both public health and public policy decisions.
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Participants will be recruited from among Nova Scotian residents who:
are aged 19-64 years;
work at a large employer in Nova Scotia (defined as an organization with 500+ employees);
have a full-time permanent or limited term occupational appointment that is anticipated to cover the study period (24 months);
work in-person at a worksite/workplace at least 3 days per week;
and are not receiving medical nutrition therapy.
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The anticipated total time commitment for participating in CHEWS is between approximately 5-6.5 hours over 24 months.
During this time, you will have study assessments every 6 months, which will include:
Filling out diet recall assessments (which ask you to record everything you ate/drank in the past 24 hours)
Collecting food and drink purchase receipts for specific weeks
Completing questionnaires about your sociodemographic information, your workplace conditions, your general health, and your household food preparation and time spent on buying/making food
Some participants, with their consent, may also be selected to participate in in-depth qualitative interviews with the research team
All study assessments can be completed online through a laptop, tablet or phone. There may be the option to complete some assessments with the assistance of a study team member in-person.
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The results of the study will shed light on the role of workplace conditions in affecting food purchasing and dietary outcomes. We hope to support organizational and public policy recommendations to support labour conditions, healthy organizations, and employee wellness.
Previous research on workplace food and diet quality has often focused on the downstream effects on health. However, there is little research to understand what role the workplace itself plays, as an organization and a social environment, in affecting food purchasing and consumption. Few studies have conducted detailed dietary assessments of a diverse group of workers, especially to see how eating at work compares to, and affects the rest of your diet.
Workers’ diet quality can be shaped by socio-economic status, the physical workplace food environment, and occupational conditions such as shift work/time use and stress, as well as individual biology and personal behavioural determinants of food purchasing.
Work and occupations can shape the cost of healthy diets, household budget available to and allocated to diets, and consumer intent and motivation.
CHEWS Team
CHEWS is being led by the Food Policy Lab at Dalhousie University, under the leadership of Principal Investigator Dr. Catherine L. Mah, MD, FRCPC, PhD. Dr Mah is a Canada Research Chair in Promoting Healthy Populations and Professor at the School of Health Administration at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Dr. Mah’s lab is home to a dynamic group of trainees and workers early in their career, building together a multi-disciplinary program of research on the environmental and policy determinants of diet and food consumption. Our lab does work on diet cost, household food insecurity, the consumer food environment, and more!
Our lab works with communities, health providers, governments, businesses, and educational institutions around the world. CHEWS brings together co-investigators in nutrition, administration, statistics, and health economics at Dalhousie University, Memorial University, and the University of Queensland, and steering committee members at workplaces in Nova Scotia, British Columbia, Ottawa, and Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. We are supported with funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR FRN #189950).
Our research is conducted at Dalhousie University, under the approval and institutional research ethics oversight of the Nova Scotia Health Research Ethics Board.
Does what you eat and drink at work affect your overall diet quality?
What role does your job and workplace environment play in your diet quality?
Help us explore these questions… while learning about your own nutrition & food purchasing and preparation behaviours, and getting to share your experiences and perspectives!
