Food Environment Inequalities and Moderating Effects of Obesity on Their Relationships with COVID-19 in Chicago

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has raised challenges for people with health problems. Obesity is a global issue related to COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) finds that obesity worsens COVID-19 outcomes. As body mass index increases, the COVID-19 death risk increases. Additionally, due to different restriction policies, the pandemic has transformed our food environment. Thus, it is important to develop an antivirus-enabled paradigm to decrease the COVID-19 spreading rate in neighborhoods with obesity concerns and design a sustainable and healthy food environment. It is found that both COVID-19 and obesity inequalities are associated with food environment inequalities, but few studies have examined the moderating effects of obesity and food environment on COVID-19. According to the Chicago Department of Public Health, more than 30% of the Chicago adult population is obese. Additionally, Chicago has 340,676 COVID-19 cases during the period between 1 March 2020 and 26 November 2021. This study uses regression models to examine the moderating effects of obesity and food environment on COVID-19 in Chicago. Besides food environment factors, green spaces and transportation access are considered. The results show COVID-19 is concentrated in areas with a high obesity rate and low food access. A 1 percent increase in obesity rate is associated with a 2.83 percent increase in COVID-19 death rate in a community. Additionally, the moderating effects of obesity on the association between food environment and COVID-19 are shown in the results.

A spatial and contextual exposome-wide association study and polyexposomic score of COVID-19 hospitalization

“…This finding along with consistent results observed in previous studies suggest that long-term food insecurity may impact COVID-19 outcomes. 5 , 47 , 48 In addition, we also found that higher long-term access to fitness and recreational sports centers is associated with lower odds of COVID-19 hospitalization. While no previous study has examined access to fitness centers and COVID-19 outcomes, the results observed in this study are consistent with the well-established protective associations between physical activity and COVID-19 outcomes.…”

Ecological Associations between Obesity Prevalence and Neighborhood Determinants Using Spatial Machine Learning in Chicago, Illinois, USA

“…The tract-level estimates, which are assessed in several prior studies [85,86], have certain limitations. The outcome variable was collected by means of a telephone survey which likely faces problems due to recall bias and social desirability bias [87,88].…”

Building Image Through Food Choice: The Effects of Unfamiliar Companion, Impression Management, and Emotional Eating on Food Portion

“…Obesogenic environments are characterised by easy access to fast food restaurants both offline and online (Gordon-Larsen, 2014;Horta et al, 2022;Miles et al, 2022;Paulitsch & Dumith, 2021;Pechey & Marteau, 2018), in which most of the foods offered are high calorie. This situation may have an unwitting effect on their health (Dreher et al, 2019;Huang, 2022), the long-term consequences of consuming high-calorie foods can lead to overweight and obesity, as suggested by several studies (Beslay et al, 2020;Elliston et al, 2017;Gordon-Larsen, 2014;Navarro & Vélez, 2019;Paulitsch & Dumith, 2021;Rahman et al, 2022).…”