Research & Practice
Fast-food consumption and the fast-food environment
Nearly one-third of Americans are obese, and two thirds are overweight. While sedentary lifestyles are part of the cause, a diet of processed foods, such as fast-food, also shares much of the blame. Fast-food restaurant exposure has been positively correlated with higher BMI and lower socioeconomic status. However, there is a lack of causal evidence linking residing in a fast-food dense area with increased frequency of fast-food consumption. Also, emerging evidence suggests that fast-food restaurant variety may play a larger role than density in understanding consumption. Little research exists on how socio-economic factors, such as neighborhood level deprivation, may affect this relationship.
A novel factor recently proposed to explain the frequency of fast-food consumption is the variety of fast-food restaurants available in the local environment, rather than the sheer quantity or density of fast-food restaurants. For example, the number and variety of fast-food restaurant chains available in the proximal home environment was a significant predictor of fast-food consumption, whereas fast-food restaurant density was not, in a recent cross-sectional study. To address some of the methodological problems of previous studies, the proposed study aims to examine the relationship between fast-food restaurant density, fast-food restaurant variety, and fast-food consumption in a twin sample. Twins are well suited for health studies because they are either identical or very similar genetically to one another, and when reared together are increasingly similar in terms of shared environmental (familial) factors.
Materials Available
Project Type(s): Master's Thesis
Author(s): Richard Lau
Program(s): Master of Public Health
Year: 2012
Adviser(s):