Obesogenic Environments: An Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between the Retail Food Environment and Childhood Obesity

摘要

The development of interventions to improve access to healthy food in the retail environment of underserved areas is a major U. S. policy endeavor and a key part of the $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), a program that seeks to increase the number of traditional food outlets in low-income neighborhoods. The introduction of traditional retail food outlets in these so called 'food deserts', however, is a costly proposition with the budgetary constraints and shopping patterns of low-income consumers (Srinivasan et al. 2013). Moreover, prior findings examining the relationship between the food environment and consumer health has been mixed (Larson, Story, and Nelson 2009; An and Sturm 2012).