Impact of Food Availability on Diet

Principal Investigator: 
Diego Rose, PhD, MPH, RD

Co-Investigators:  Nick Bodor, Tom Farley, MD, MPH, Chris Swalm, Janet Rice, PhD

In 2006, investigators began work on two new projects exploring the effects of the neighborhood environment on food consumption by residents.  Neighborhood environments may contribute to the problem of obesity by providing excess availability of calorie-dense snack foods and insufficient availability of low-calorie nutritious foods such as fruits and vegetables.  Low-income individuals - who often have difficult access to fresh fruits and vegetables - consume less of these foods and are more likely to be overweight than others.  Both projects seek to better our understanding of how neighborhood food availability influences consumer choice by integrating concepts and methods developed in the fields of public health nutrition, geography, and retail marketing into a consumer economics framework.

Neighborhood Food Availability, Consumer Economics, and Sentinel Food Consumption

This 2-year project is funded by the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute through an R-21 research grant.  The specific aims of this project are:

• To develop a standard set of measures of neighborhood food availability and a detailed modeling framework in which to test the association of these measures with consumption;
• To determine whether the availability of fruits and vegetables at the neighborhood level is associated with consumption of these foods by individuals, after controlling for prices, household income, and individual sociao-deomographic characteristics.  We hypothesize that there will be an independent and positive effect of availability of consumption;
• And to determine whether the availability of calorie-dense snack foods at the neighborhood level is associated with consumption of these foods by individuals, after controlling for prices, household income, and individual socio-deomographic characteristics.  We hypothesize that there will be an independent and positive effect of availability of consumption.

This is a secondary data analysis focused on 106 census tracts in urban southeast Louisiana.  We will use data from the Louisiana Neighborhood Environment and Consumption Survey (LANECS), conducted from July 2004 to August 2005, along with store outlet databases provided by the Louisiana Office of Public Health and InfoUSA. The analysis will employ a set of innovative measures of neighborhood availability based on GIS calculated distance and density measures that considers not only access to stores of different types, but also shelf space deveoted to key food items in those stores.

New Orleans Food Access and Consumption Study 

This project is funded for three years through the USDA's Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service through their National Research Initiative.  This is an integrated project, meaning that the research is integrated with extension and teaching components.

The research objectives are similar to those described in the former study.  The main distinction is that in this study, we are focused specifically on the City of New Orleans and the data sources are different.  We will rely on data from the 2004 and 2005 New Orleans Behavioral Risk Factor Suveillance System for information on fruit, vegetable and snack food consumption.  Geo-mapping will be at the level of the census tract, rather than single point address mapping, so that store availability measures will be density-based (e.g., number of supermarkets per tract), rather than distance-based (e.g., distance from the respondent's house to the closest supermarket).

Objectives for the extension and education components include:

• Based on our research, develop indicators that describe and rank neighborhoods on their food availability and access for use in planning of interventions.
• Develop extension activities to disseminate our approach first to those working in New Orleans and then via the web to those working in other urban centers.
• Use our research to enhance our educational curriculum by developing a course and field-placement opportunities for masters and doctoral-level nutrition students that integrates the concepts of food access, consumer economics, and GIS mapping techniques.