Laurette Dubé

McGill University | McGill · Desautels Faculty of Management

Availability bias influences decisions by how readily certain events, objects, or people can be brought to mind. This “ out of sight, out of mind ” effect depends on whether these elements are present during decision-making. To promote sustainable food consumption, understanding this bias is crucial, as marketing promotions exhibit heterogeneity in...

Introduction & Background Human behaviour is multi-faceted and complex, with different dimensions interacting and impacting each other and individuals operating in an environmental context. In order to understand this behaviour better, the combination of data from different sources is useful to uncover some of those interactions and complexities. W...

Background: Nutritional risk has been linked to individual social factors, but the relationship with the overall social environment has not been assessed. Objectives: To evaluate associations between different support profiles of the social environment and nutritional risk using cross-sectional data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging...

Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias is a major public health burden–compounding over upcoming years due to longevity. Recently, clinical evidence hinted at the experience of social isolation in expediting dementia onset. In 502,506 UK Biobank participants and 30,097 participants from the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging, we revisited trad...

As a means to understanding the healthiness of the food environment, obtaining big data (big food and other types) to model the built environment becomes critical. In this paper, we train and test seven different ML methods on bigdata from census data to predict the healthiness of the food environment. We introduce a synthetic ecosystem platform th...

Objective Self-monitoring, one of the most important behaviors for successful weight loss, can be facilitated through mobile health applications (mHealth apps). Therefore, it is of interest to determine whether consistent users of these apps succeed in achieving their weight goals. This study used data from an mHealth app that enabled tracking of...

This research explores the justification and implications of incorporating consumption variety into mobile-based food recommendation systems. Our study makes use of data from a popular mobile fitness app, in which we can observe large volumes of daily food logs of thousands of users. We first confirm that consumption variety is associated with lowe...

Introduction Consumer food procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic has been understudied. This investigation aimed to longitudinally evaluate food procurement patterns, concern of virus exposure in grocery retailers, and food access challenges over the pandemic among a sample of households in Quebec, Canada. Methods Online surveys were collected...

There is increasing interest in the effect that food environments may have on obesity, particularly through mechanisms related to the marketing and consumption of calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods and sugary beverages. Price promotions, such as temporary price discounts, have been particularly effective in the marketing of carbonated soft drinks (...

The dopamine receptor 4 (DRD4) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) acts to modulate behaviours including cognitive control and motivation, and has been implicated in behavioral inhibition and responsivity to food cues. Adolescence is a sensitive period for the development of habitual eating behaviors and obesity risk, with potential mediation by develop...

Alzheimer's disease and related dementias is a major public health burden - compounding over upcoming years due to longevity. Recently, clinical evidence hinted at the experience of social isolation in expediting dementia onset. In 502,506 UK Biobank participants and 30,097 participants from the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging, we revisited tr...

Purpose This paper aims to elucidate some of the complexity around food consumption by drawing from neuroscience research of food as a motivated choice (i.e. a neurobehavioral process sensitive to dopaminergic response to food and environmental cues such as marketing). The authors explore the single and compounded effect of the motivational salienc...

Vegetable consumption remains consistently low despite supportive policy and investments across the world. Vegetables are available in great variety, ranging in their processing level, availability, cost, and arguably, nutritional value. A retrospective longitudinal study was conducted in Quebec, Canada to explore pathways of socioeconomic inequity...

Low fruit and vegetable consumption (FVC) remains a global health challenge. Fostering subsistence agriculture through the production and home-grown consumption (HGC) of fruits and vegetables are seen as potential strategies for improving overall FVC, in particular, for developing countries like India. In addition, educational strategies targeting...

In confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), post hoc model modification (PMM) indexes are often used to adjust for possible residual correlations between items. Although the approach is useful for improving model goodness-of-fit, it requires an iterative, one-item-pair-at-a-time procedure that can be tedious and prone to error. This paper provides a did...

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a complex disease resulting from multiscale risk factors including genetics, age, and psychosocial factors (PSFs) such as depression and social isolation. However, previous research has lacked in operationalizing multiscale risk factors to determine individual and interactive associations over the life co...

Background Evidence for the impact of the food retailing environment on food-related and obesity outcomes remains equivocal, but only a few studies have attempted to identify sub-populations for whom this relationship might be stronger than others. Genetic polymorphisms related to dopamine signalling have been associated with differences in respons...

As a holistic framework, food well-being (FWB) is conceived as “a positive psychological, physical, emotional, and social relationship with food at both individual and societal levels” (Block et al. 2011, p.5). It traces ways forward for research and action for individuals and society through five domains: food socialization, literacy, marketing, a...

The role of the retail food environment in obesity risk is unclear, which may be due in part to the lack of consideration of individual differences in the responsivity to food cues. This cross-sectional investigation geo-temporally linked the CARTaGENE biobank (including genetic, dietary, lifestyle, and anthropometric data) with in-store retail foo...

Different facets of a rapidly changing modern lifestyle and environment are viewed as social determinants of the increasing prevalence of chronic physical and mental disorders such as type 2 diabetes (T2D) and depression. These disorders arise to a significant extent from the cumulative effect of genetic predispositions and contextual exposures, as...

Various approaches – for and not-for-profit – have been offered as a means of addressing the endemic nature of rural poverty and undernutrition. EKutir, a social enterprise, has sought to address rural poverty through a team of microentrepreneurs that leverage information and communication technologies (ICT) to connect farmers more efficiently with...

Background Pathways underlying the stress–depression relationship in mothers, and the factors that buffer this relationship are not well understood. Aims Drawing from the Stress Process model, this study examines (1) if parental stress mediates the association between socioeconomic characteristics and depressive symptoms, and (2) if social support...

Body weight is substantially determined by eating behaviors, which are themselves driven by biological factors interacting with the environment. Previous studies in young children suggest that genetic influences on dopamine function may confer differential susceptibility to the environment in such a way that increases behavioral obesity risk in a l...

Research on sustainable consumption has gained much popularity in the past few years, and the of the green gap phenomenon has had its share of studies. This phenomenon is known as the discrepancy between what consumers say about their growing concern regarding the environment, on the one hand, and what they truly do to help sustain this environment...

Genetic differential susceptibility states that individuals may vary both by exhibiting poor responses when exposed to adverse environments, and disproportionally benefiting from positive settings. The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) may be particularly implicated in these effects, including disturbed eating behaviors that might lead to obesity. H...

Background/aims: Gene-environment interactions may be relevant for nutrition outcomes. This study assessed the interaction between DRD2/ANKK1 Taq1A genotype and exposures to in-store retail food environment on diet quality. Methods: CARTaGENE biobank data (n = 3,532) were linked to provincial food retail data. The Canadian adaptation of the Heal...

This paper reports results of a quasi-experimental study designed to assess the impact of an information and communication technology (ICT) –enabled ecosystem, led by the social enterprise eKutir, on household fruit and vegetable consumption in Odisha, India. eKutir aims at providing self-sustaining solutions to poverty and undernutrition in develo...

Ansari et al. (Psychometrika 67:49–77, 2002) applied a multilevel heterogeneous model for confirmatory factor analysis to repeated measurements on individuals. While the mean and factor loadings in this model vary across individuals, its factor structure is invariant. Allowing the individual-level residuals to be correlated is an important means to...

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the development of a knowledge-based infrastructure to support MSP decision-making processes. The paper emerged from a study to define specifications for a knowledge-based infrastructure to provide decision support for community-level MSPs in the Canadian province of Quebec. As part of the study,...

A vast amount of evidence has shown that exposure to prenatal or early postnatal stress can impact the developing individual, increasing the susceptibility to several unfavorable outcomes later in life. It seems that these adversities induce adaptations, altering the metabolism to favor survival at critical periods, but at the expense of the indivi...

Evidence shows that extremes of birth weight (BW) carry a common increased risk for the development of adiposity and related cardiovascular diseases, but little is known about the role of obesogenic behaviors in this process. Moreover, no one has empirically examined whether the relationship between BW, obesogenic behaviors and BMI along the full l...

Anonymized dataset. (ZIP)

Parental stress has been shown associated with children's eating behaviors. The stress-buffering hypothesis suggests that social resources, i.e., resources accessed via one's social networks, may prevent or attenuate the impact of stress on health. Prior research on the stress-buffering hypothesis has found evidence for the protective effects of so...

Evidence suggests that both high and low birth weight children have increased the risk for obesity and the metabolic syndrome in adulthood. Previously we have found altered feeding behaviour and food preferences in pre-school children and adults born with low birth weight. In this study, we investigated if birth weight was associated with different...

Sustainable solutions for complex societal problems, like poverty, require informing stakeholders about progress and changes needed as they collaborate. Yet, inter-organizational collaboration researchers highlight monumental challenges in measuring seemingly intangible factors during collective impact processes. We grapple with the question: How c...

Effective approaches to non-communicable disease (NCD) prevention require intersectoral action targeting health and engaging government, industry, and society. There is an ongoing vigorous exploration of the most effective and appropriate role of government in intersectoral partnerships. This debate is particularly pronounced with regards to the ro...

The food system in developed countries is unsustainable, with industrialized production and consumption practices binding many developed countries into states of overnutrition, of alarming levels of obesity, and of diabetes and other noncommunicable diseases. Yet, despite a proliferation of policies, programs, and investments aimed at their prevent...

As a commonly used tool for operationalizing measurement models, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) requires strong assumptions that can lead to a poor fit of the model to real data. The post hoc modification model approach attempts to improve CFA fit through the use of modification indexes for identifying significant correlated residual error term...

Attachment relationships play an important role in people's wellbeing and affliction with physical and mental illnesses, including eating disorders. Seven reviews from the clinical field have consistently shown that higher attachment insecurity-failure to form trusting and reliable relationships with others-systematically characterized individuals...

Background: We have shown that intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) leads to increased preference for palatable foods at different ages in both humans and rodents. In IUGR rodents, altered striatal dopamine signaling associates with a preference for palatable foods. Objectives: Our aim was to investigate if a multilocus genetic score reflectin...

Background: Neighborhood food cues have been inconsistently related to residents' health, possibly due to variations in residents' sensitivity to such cues. This study sought to investigate the degree to which children's predisposition to eat upon exposure to food environment and food cues (external eating), could explain differences in strength o...

Equitable access to and consumption of healthy foods has yet to be achieved in many societies. To better understand the complex market dynamics that make it difficult for healthy food and healthy eating markets to develop at scale across the socioeconomic spectrum, we perform an integrative analysis of the market infrastructure. Using causal loop d...

Objectives. Sleep plays a critical role in the health and well-being of children. Individual and household factors, including parent’s social connections, may impact children’s sleep. Our study assessed the association between children’s sleep disturbances and parent’s social capital in a sample of Canadian households. Design: Cross-sectional, obse...

The differential susceptibility model states that a given genetic variant is associated with an increased risk of pathology in negative environments but greater than average resilience in enriched ones. While this theory was first implemented in psychiatric-genetic research, it may also help us to unravel the complex ways that genes and environment...

Background: Recent evidence suggests that early exposure to low maternal sensitivity is a risk factor for obesity in children and adolescents. A separate line of study shows that the seven-repeat (7R) allele of the dopamine-4 receptor gene (DRD4) increases susceptibility to environmental factors including maternal sensitivity. The current study in...

In Reply There are 2 important comments made by Yeo et al1 about our article published in JAMA Pediatrics.2 First, the authors raise the possibility that “the differences observed might not be related to environmental influence on gene expression, but rather reflect the options available to the individual for gaining reward.”1 This is an interestin...

The last decades have seen the emergence of cross-sectoral social partnerships (CSSPs) formed to accelerate responses to the threats confronting environmental and human health. With both threats and solutions being woven in a complex and dynamic way into the core fabric of modern society, CSSPs have risen in a somewhat ad hoc fashion with the threa...

Importance Genes may work by modulating the way individuals respond to environmental variation, and these discrete and differential genes vs environmental interactions may not be readily captured in simple association studies.Objective To determine whether children carrying the 7-repeat allele of the DRD4 gene living under adverse economic condit...

Present research compares food beliefs associated with a naturally nutritious agricultural product (namely pulses) in Western and Eastern cultures (namely the US and India). Specifically, this paper focuses on the perception of healthiness and tastefulness of the food and their relationship. Two studies tested the effect of processing level, cultur...

With intensively collected longitudinal data, recent advances in the experience-sampling method (ESM) benefit social science empirical research, but also pose important methodological challenges. As traditional statistical models are not generally well equipped to analyze a system of variables that contain feedback loops, this paper proposes the ut...

Introduction: A consistent eating style might be beneficial to avoid overeating in a food-rich environment. Eating consistency entails maintaining a similar dietary pattern across different eating situations. This construct is relatively under-studied, but the available evidence suggests that eating consistency supports successful weight maintenan...

Control rules are parental practices that use food, especially those high in fat or sugar, as an instrumental reinforcer to encourage children to behave in a normative manner in non-food domains. Past laboratory experiments show that repeatedly presenting snacks as a reward or associated with adults' attention, increases children's preference for t...

Eating habits are established early and are difficult to change once formed. This study investigated the role of caregiver-child attachment quality and its associations with high-caloric food consumption in a sample of middle socio-economic status children and adults, respectively. Survey data were collected from an online questionnaire administere...

Multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) have become a widespread means for deploying policies in a whole of society strategy to address the complex problem of childhood obesity. However, decision-making in MSPs is fraught with challenges, as decision-makers are faced with complexity, and have to reconcile disparate conceptualizations of knowledge acr...

In this study, business customer expectations in multinational markets were elicited in terms of attributes, consequences and personal values and their reflection in advertising was assessed. Hypotheses related to cross-cultural similarities and differences in these expectations were presented. Similarities were predicted on the basis of universali...

Background Poor inhibitory control is associated with overeating and/or obesity in school-age children, adolescents and adults. The current study examined whether an objective and reliable marker of response inhibition, the Stop-Signal Reaction Time (SSRT), is associated with BMI z-scores and/or food intake during a snack test in pre-school childre...

Building greater reciprocity between traditional and modern food systems and better convergence of human and economic development outcomes may enable the production and consumption of accessible, affordable, and appealing nutritious food for all. Information being key to such transformations, this roadmap paper offers a strategy that capitalizes on...

The causes of many vexing challenges facing 21st-century society are at the nexus of systems involved in agriculture, health and wealth production, consumption, and distribution. Using food as a test bed, and on the basis of emerging roadmaps that set achievable objectives over a 1- to 3-year horizon, we introduce this special feature with converge...

This paper introduces convergent innovation (CI) as a form of meta-innovation-an innovation in the way we innovate. CI integrates human and economic development outcomes, through behavioral and ecosystem transformation at scale, for sustainable prosperity and affordable universal health care within a whole-of-society paradigm. To this end, CI combi...

The paper outlines how the principles of convergent innovation (CI) can be applied to bring about a transformation in the pulse value chain. The paper presents three pioneering CI initiatives––two in conception and one in operation––by various actors in the pulse ecosystem, which are delivering economic and human development impact in particular se...

Changes to health-related behaviors, including physical activity and nutrition, could prevent up to 80% of heart disease, diabetes and respiratory diseases and 40% of cancers. In this light since 2002, a multi-stakeholder partnership (MSP) between a private foundation and the provincial government of Quebec, Canada has been supporting community org...

In adopting a whole-of-society (WoS) approach that engages multiple stakeholders in public health policies across contexts, the authors propose that effective governance presents a challenge. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a case for how polycentric governance underlying the WoS approach is already functioning, while outlining an agenda...