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 To see how the food-purchasing options that people encounter every
day might impact their likelihood of gaining too much weight,
researchers mapped out home and work addresses for 710 adults in and
around New Orleans as well as all the supermarkets, smaller grocery
stores, fast food restaurants and fancier dining establishments near
these locations and along their commuting routes.
As expected, people who passed more fast-food restaurants during
their commute had higher body mass index (BMI, a measure of weight
relative to height) than those who encountered fewer outlets.
Surprisingly, people who had more supermarkets - the bigger
retailers that typically have a wider variety of fresh produce - and
smaller grocery stores near home had higher average BMIs than people
who had fewer places to purchase groceries, the study also found.
This suggests that the ready availability of unhealthy food is part
of the problem, but so are people who bypass the produce aisles to
grab junk food and frozen dinners.
"Unfortunately, customers' preferences are the main problem," said
Adriana Dornelles, author of the study and an economics researcher
at Arizona State University, Tempe.
"The trap of the quick-cheap-easy meal has become a norm among
Americans," Dornelles said.
Although there is growing evidence that the distribution of food
retailers and restaurants can impact individual eating habits, much
of this research has focused only on residential neighborhoods and
concentrated either on exclusively urban or rural communities,
Dornelles writes in PLoS ONE.
In the current study, participants lived in three New Orleans
parishes - Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles - that include a mix
of housing density.
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Participants wore accelerometers - devices to measure physical
activity - for one week. The majority of people in the study, 85%,
averaged less than 30 minutes a day of physical activity.
Trained examiners measured participants' height and weight to
calculate BMI during physical exams; the average BMI was 29.4, which
is considered overweight and on the verge of obese.
There was no meaningful connection between BMI and the number of
fast food establishments near participants' homes.
BMI also didn't appear to be influenced by the number of
restaurants, supermarkets or grocery stores near where people
worked.
One limitation of the analysis is that it didn't look at what foods
people actually bought or ate, or how often they frequented
different types of restaurants or retailers. The study also mapped
commutes based on the fastest route from homes to workplaces, and
it's possible some participants took different routes.
Even so, the results offer fresh evidence that what's available to
eat close to where people spend their time, can impact eating habits
and obesity, said Tamara Dubowitz, a food policy researcher at RAND
Corporation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who wasn't involved in the
study.
"Being conscious of the way in which our environment makes it
difficult to be healthy, and trying to put ourselves in environments
that are health-promoting, whatever and wherever that environment is
- is something that we can all take home and learn from," Dubowitz
said by email.
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2MNOGqO PLoS ONE, online August 7, 2019.
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