Michigan Nutritional Environments Assessment Tool

About Healthy Food Environments

A healthy food environment is one where access to food options is promoted and supported in the classroom, in the workplace and throughout the community.

Schools and worksites can provide a healthy food environment by providing a place to eat that is both comfortable and pleasant and by offering healthy food options in cafeterias, vending machines, at meetings and at special events. These institutions can also create an environment that promotes learning about good eating and physical activity for long-term good health. Schools and workplaces benefit from providing healthier work and school environments. For example, research consistently shows that eating a well-balanced breakfast improves employee performance and students’ test scores; reduces tardiness and absenteeism; increases attention; and improves behavior and emotional adjustment.

The community at large can support healthy eating by providing healthy food choices at a reasonable price at restaurants, grocery stores and convenience stores; by offering additional access to healthy foods (such as fruits and vegetables); by providing positive messages about healthy food choices; and by offering educational opportunities and support for improving eating habits.

Examples of nutrition environmental changes include increasing the availability of fresh fruit and vegetables via farmers markets and community gardens; working with restaurants to provide menu recipe analysis; encouraging a worksite to provide formal policies so that healthy snacks are provided at meetings; increasing media promotion of healthy foods; or modifying the school food service environment to provide a greater number of options that are healthier.

To change your community’s food environment, it is best to first obtain an understanding of how specific aspects of the environment affect eating behaviors and habits. This will assist you in mapping out a system in which members vested in the community are able to implement change for the better. The Nutrition Environment Assessment Tool can assist your community in gaining such an understanding in targeting areas for positive change.

Follow these seven steps to create a healthy nutrition environment.

Assemble a Nutrition Environment Assessment Team. The first step toward improving your community’s nutrition environment is to identify a team of people who will be responsible for completing the Nutrition Environment Assessment Tool. Broad participation is important for meaningful assessment and successful planning and implementation. Representatives and stakeholders from groups such as the following will help ensure success:

Community planners
Local government
Community parks and recreation departments
Health professionals
Community groups,organizations & leagues
Local businesses and the Chamber of Commerce
Schools
Restaurant and grocery store management
Colleges and university extension specialists and health educators
Social service organizations
Libraries
Senior centers and nursing homes
Places of worship
Local Media

Review the Nutrition Environment Assessment Tool (NEAT). Ask all team members to review the NEAT prior to your first meeting. Register your community at the website-it takes less than five minutes. This allows you to provide all team members access to the online NEAT. Your team can also preview a copy of the NEAT (and print it if they like) from the Preview the NEAT page of this website.

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Meet to discuss the assessment. At the first meeting, discuss the Nutrition Environment Assessment Tool as a group. Determine who will be responsible for research the answers to each section or subsection and set a timeline for the completion of the assessment. Working as a team will increase the accuracy of responses and tap into creative insights. Make sure everyone has access to the NEAT.

Prior to the meeting, a representative from the community should register for the NEAT if you have not already done so. Registration occurs online at this website and takes less than 5 minutes. Registering at this point ensures that only one group per community is registered for NEAT. If a person has registered prior to you, contact us and we will put you in touch with the other group so you can consolidate your efforts.

Questions to answer at this meeting include:

What is the target community?
What are the community boundaries?
How will the team reach consensus on the responses?

The team may also want to answer the following at the meeting (or this may become a topic for the research and data gathering phase):

What are the major industries/businesses in the community?
Which are the schools are in the area of interest?
What are the major grocery stores or convenience stores?
What are the most popular fast food and family style restaurants?
What is the largest medical practice serving the community?
What newspaper, TV station and radio station have the largest audience?

Complete the assessment. The assessment can be completed in a number of different ways, such as:

Each team member could answer all the questions by getting any needed information and then meet again to discuss responses and arrive at consensus;
Questions could be given to members grouped by areas of specialty with responses communicated to the group for their approval; or
Team members could target individual questions to answer and come together to compile the data and achieve consensus at the next meeting.

The method for researching the information can be tailored to the needs of the members involved. Similarly the assignments for entering data on the NEAT can be distributed at the first meeting or can be done after consensus is achieved. The advantage for interim data entry (between the first and second meeting) is that automated scorecard calculations are available to the entire team to view as the process progresses and at the next meeting. The scorecard provides useful feedback as you go along.

NOTE: It is important that teams coordinate data entry. Multiple team members can log in and enter data into your community’s NEAT at the same time. This is convenient but care must be taken to avoid overwriting each other’s work. (The instructions – available after you register - provide easy ways to avoid any issues.)

It is important to document all data as this will be useful future comparisons and to note progress.

When the team has arrived at consensus for all questions, final data entry can occur and the NEAT can be finalized (go through final electronic validations for accuracy and completeness) to obtain a final score. If an internet connection is available at the meeting, this can be done during the meeting.

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Meet to develop a plan. After completion of the assessment, the team members should meet again to discuss each question and its scoring descriptions. The team can then use these results to begin planning a Healthy Eating Initiative or strategic plan. The plan should look at the resources and benefits that are available in the community to come up with solutions to concerns that were found. Target completion dates should be set and a method for keeping team members informed and involved should be discussed.

The NEAT Action Plan (available to the community immediately after finalization of the NEAT) provides a useful online tool to help your team plan and prioritize actions and to track progress over time. Because team members can log in and view the Action Plan from any location at any time, this may serve as a convenient and timely way of keeping team members up to date on the progress of any changes.

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Implement changes. Put your plans into action and determine how you will evaluate whether or not they are successful. Evaluation methods should be considered BEFORE implementing an activity or program.

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Evaluate your program and make any necessary modifications. After you’ve implemented several changes and allowed for sufficient time for them to have an effect, evaluate them. Evaluation will help you track the progress of your objectives, and provide valuable feedback on your program’s strengths and areas for improvement.

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Presented by the Michigan Healthy Communities Collaborative