The Public Health Effects of Food Deserts Workshop Summary (2009) / Chapter Skim
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3 Studying Food Deserts Through Different Lenses
3 Studying Food Deserts Through Different Lenses
Pages 27-36
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From page 27... ...
Presenters in the next session looked at food deserts with some complementary methodological approaches -- epidemiology, geography, and economics and urban planning -- and discussed what they can and cannot tell us about the link between food access and health. EPIDEMIOLOGICAL APPROACH As researchers investigate ways to improve people's health, they have turned to the local food environment.
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From page 28... ...
However, Diez Roux emphasized that environmental constraints and reinforcements, such as local food availability and affordability, are just some of many factors that affect health. As discussed by the previous panel, researchers have used many different databases and instruments to understand local food environments.
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From page 29... ...
Challenges to understanding the causal links remain, including determining which aspects of the local food environment (e.g., availability, price, convenience) are most relevant to health, how to measure and what to use as a proxy, the scale at which changes to the local food environment are most effective, and reasonable time lags and critical periods in which to expect any effects to occur.
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From page 30... ...
shows equivocal findings about the existence of food deserts in many European countries -- but clear evidence of disparities in food access in the United States by income and race. Natural Experiments The underlying conceptual model behind why food deserts affect health is that of "deprivation amplification": Residents of low-income neighborhoods are exposed to poor-quality local food environments that amplify their individual risk factors for poor health (Macintyre, 2007)
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From page 31... ...
The opening of two large supermarkets in Glasgow and Leeds, both in deprived areas in the United Kingdom, provided the opportunity to study the effect of increasing access to food retail opportunities as a solution (the Leeds study was discussed by Neil Wrigley during the second day of the workshop and is summarized in Chapter 5)
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From page 32... ...
Since the 1960s, economists have used hedonic price models and discrete choice models to explain residential location choice, focusing on characteristics related to housing and the surrounding community. Little research has been done on how food access may enter into people's choices, although new urbanism or smart growth, in which a mixture of land uses are located in the same neighborhood within walking distance, would include food outlets.
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From page 33... ...
Urban Planning and Food Environments Song explained that planners distinguish between basic, revenuegenerating land use and nonbasic, service-related land use. The current curriculum at urban planning schools favors planning small-scale food stores in mixed-use development for easy access by local households.
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From page 34... ...
Song noted that in urban planning, simulations are used to build scenarios to observe the effect, holding everything else constant, of a specific policy intervention. Mixed Land Use Whether mixed land use promotes positive health effects is, according to Song, a debatable topic.
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From page 35... ...
One workshop participant questioned whether food desert health outcomes are really due to limited food access or perhaps more likely to limited healthcare access. Diez Roux agreed the issues are confounded because the real world is complex, and it is difficult to separate the causal effect of food access.
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From page 36... ...
Similarly, in the United Kingdom, retail leverage generation (planning gain) is considered a tool to improve the local economy through providing employment and upgrading public facilities such as sidewalks and other infrastructure.
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