RDC News: February 2026

Holiday Closures

This month we will have the following changes to our usual operating hours:

• Closed for Family Day on Monday February 16th.

Saturday Hours – On Demand

We will be offering Saturday hours this month, Saturday, February 7th – 12pm to 4pm. We will be open on an ‘appointment’ basis, only if requested. Please sign up via the online booking system.

Congrats & Kudos

Congratulations to McMaster RDC researcher Oliver Li, who successfully defended his MSc thesis in the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact (HEI) in December. The title of his thesis was “Investigating the Muscle-Bone Unit in Children and Adolescents using Jumping Mechanography and Peripheral Quantitative Computed Tomography“, supervised by Dr. Jinhui Ma. This work used cycles 5 and 6 of the Canadian Health Measures Survey.

And congratulations to McMaster RDC researcher Stephenson Strobel (Dept of Family Medicine and Dept of Economics), who was co-author on a paper in The Lancet Neurology, which used data from the Canadian Health Survey on Seniors (CHSS). The full citation is:
Herpes zoster vaccination and incident dementia in Canada: an analysis of natural experiments. (2026)  Pomirchy, M., Chung, S., Bommer, C., Strobel, S., &?Geldsetzer, P. The Lancet Neurology, 25(2), 170 – 180.

Congrats, Oliver and Stephenson! 

New data sets at the RDC:

Canadian Food Environment Database (Can-FED) 2024

The Canadian Food Environment Database (Can-FED) 2024 is now available for download and can be accessed by researchers with approved projects.

The Canadian Food Environment Dataset (Can-FED) is a geographic-based set of measures that represents the food environment of Canadian communities. The primary envisioned use of the Can-FED is research and analysis of the relationship between the local food environment, dietary intake and health outcomes. By using geography conversion tools such as the Postal Code Conversion File (PCCF+), it is possible to link Can-FED measures to individual-level health data from national-level survey platforms (e.g., the Canadian Health Measures Survey and the Canadian Community Health Survey) or to investigator-led cohorts.

A diversity of food categories was chosen to represent an inclusive set of different and overarching food outlet types, such as healthy food retailers (e.g., supermarkets, grocery stores), convenient food options (e.g., corner stores, fast-food outlets), and independent and specialty retailers (e.g., bakeries, fish markets, coffee shops), amongst other options.

For more information about this data set, visit https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/13200001.

If you would like more information on how to submit a proposal for access to this data see https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/microdata/data-centres/access.

For more information about the RDC program please contact your local RDC analyst.

For a list of all the most recent data releases, see https://crdcn.ca/publications-data/data/.