Assessment of food environment at work and its association with cardiometabolic health among employed adults in Delhi, India.

Background And Aims: Unhealthy food environment at work is believed to be playing a role in the burgeoning obesity, cardiometabolic risk, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases in India. Therefore, food environment assessment at work is crucial to understand the effect of food environment and to find its association with cardiometabolic risk among adults in Delhi, India.

Methodology: Mix-methods study to find association between worksite food environment on the food choices, dietary behavior, and cardio-metabolic health of 455 apparently healthy adults (both males and females) aged 25-55 years was done in urban India.

Results: Unhealthy food environment, poor eating pattern and sedentary lifestyle at work resulted in clustering of CMR factors among the study participants. Work environment assessment revealed that worksites with canteens had higher overall CHEW score for all its domains (Physical, nutritional, and information environment), in comparison to worksites without or no canteens. Four out of ten apparently healthy adults had metabolic syndrome indicating poor cardiometabolic health. The odds of CMR in subjects with access to canteen (unhealthy food) were estimated to be 0.74 (CI: 0.51 to 1.07; p = 0.11) times the odds of CMR in subjects without canteen (limited access to food). Females (β:0.34; 95% CI:0.23, 0.44; p = 0.00) had high CMR factors in comparison to males. Overall cardiometabolic risk factors increased with age (β:0.01; 95% CI:0.01,0.01; p = 0.00).

Conclusion: Findings of the present study urge the need for dietary and lifestyle intervention along with longitudinal studies to further disentangle the association of the food and work environment on the prevalence of CMR among adults.