The proportion of excessive fast-food consumption attributable to the neighbourhood food environment among youth living within 1 km of their school

Abstract

The study objective was to estimate the proportion of excessive fast-food consumption by youth that is attributable to living and attending school in a neighbourhood with a moderate or high density of fast-food restaurants. This was a cross-sectional study of 6099 Canadian youths (aged 11-15 years) from 255 school neighbourhoods. All participants lived within 1 km of their school. The density of chain fast-food restaurants within a 1-km circular buffer surrounding each school was determined using geographic information systems. Excessive fast-food consumption (≥2 times per week) was assessed by questionnaire. Multilevel logistic regression analysis was used to examine associations. The population attributable risk estimates of excessive fast-food consumption due to neighbourhood exposure to fast-food restaurants were determined based on the prevalence of exposure and the results from the logistic regression. Eight percent of participants were excessive fast-food consumers. After adjusting for sociodemographic factors (i.e., gender, race, and socioeconomic status), it was found that youths from neighbourhoods with a moderate (odds ratio (OR), 1.68; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.11-2.54) or high (OR 1.70; 95% CI 1.12-2.56) density of chain fast-food restaurants were more likely to be excessive fast-food consumers than were youths from neighbourhoods with no chain fast-food restaurants. Approximately 31% of excessive consumption was attributable to living in neighbourhoods with a moderate or high density of fast-food restaurants. Thus, the fast-food retail environment within which youth live and go to school is an important contributor to their eating behaviours.

Association of neighbourhood food availability with the consumption of processed and ultra-processed food products by children in a city of Brazil: a multilevel analysis

“…The selection of the covariates was based on both the association of SES (e.g. education) with consumption of highly processed foods (56)(57)(58) and their inclusion in other research that evaluated the food environment and youth (59)(60)(61)(62) .…”

Assessing the validity of commercial and municipal food environment data sets in Vancouver, Canada

“…DMTI Spatial, Inc. 2003 (14) , 2006 (15) and 2009 (16) ), but such data sets are constructed for business purposes and may not achieve levels of quality necessary for research (11) . To date, many Canadian studies of the community nutrition environment surrounding schools have relied on Yellow Pages (commercial) food outlet directories (10,(17)(18)(19) . A recent review, however, found that Yellow Pages directories perform poorly in measures of validity compared with more expensive commercial sources (12) .…”

Nutritional psychiatry research: an emerging discipline and its intersection with global urbanization, environmental challenges and the evolutionary mismatch

“…New research also confirms that excessive fast-food consumption is indeed attributable to the neighborhood food environment, with as much as 31% of the variance in excessive consumption attributable to living in urban areas with a moderate or high density of fast-food outlets [169]. However, fruit and vegetable consumption is markedly diminished in neighborhoods with a high clustering of fast-food outlets [170,171].…”