Another ground-breaking study has just been released on how proximity to junk food sources effects weight issues among young people. Seems that, the closer to a junk food source they live, the fatter they are. We needed an expensive university-based study to figure this out?
No big surprise: The closer kids live to junk food outlets, the more
likely they are to be, or become overweight or obese.
What they did
Researchers at the NYU School of Medicine spent hours of perfectly good time and (probably) public money studying the relationship between proxi9mity to junk food and overweight/obesity in school-aged kids.
The team’s findings came from an analysis of public-school records from kindergarten through high school, which included periodic measurements of children’s height and weight. Researchers used mapping software to compare that information with how far every child lived from sellers of both junk and healthy foods, at fast food outlets, corner stores, sit-down restaurants and grocery stores.
What they found
The research team found that, among children between the ages of 5 and 18 living within a half-block of a fast-food outlet, 20 percent were obese and 38 percent were overweight. Similarly, among children who lived within a half- block of corner stores or bodegas, 21 percent were obese and 40 percent overweight.
For every half or full block farther away that students lived from unhealthy food sources, obesity figures dropped from between 1 percent to more than 4 percent, depending on the type of food outlet.
“Just having food outlets a block farther away — and potentially less convenient or accessible — can significantly lessen children’s chances of being obese or overweight,” says Study Senior Investigator Dr. Brian Elbel.
The takeaway
Even a drop in obesity rates of just a few percentage points, Elbel says, translates into potentially saving thousands of children from obesity and its associated health problems, including increased risks of heart disease, diabetes, and early death.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that about one in five school-age children in the United States have an excess of body fat and are now obese – a tripling of rates since the 1970s. Record numbers are also overweight.
Dr. Obvious’ take
Where have these people been living? Are they so young that they can’t remember the last round of studies about kids and junk food? I remember there being a great kerfuffle around 1980, when Fast Food restaurants were expanding across the urban landscape like a plague of locusts: the controversy at City Planning Commission when council members asked that a new McDonald’s not be allowed to locate itself within a certain distance of a high school, for fear it would entice kids to eat an unhealthy lunch.
Common sense prevailed on this one decades before the bean counters even showed an interest, much less did anything to quantify the matter.
My take
It’s enough to intuit that close proximity of kids to junk food is likely to make them fatter. Anybody can figure that out. Why did we need a ‘learned study’ and ‘data analysis’ to confirm what anybody with a healthy pair of eyes can see for themselves?
~ Maggie J.