Where you live affects what you eat: Insights on how the food environment shapes eating habits

The significance of a healthy food environment is manifold. The food environment shapes the food habits and choices of people. A healthy food environment supports everyone in making healthy food choices, and needless to say, an unhealthy one may result in several negative outcomes and diet-related issues.

A recent study published in the journal Health & Place aimed at finding out how difficult it would be for others to sustain the Mediterranean and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (MED-DASH) versus default to the Typical American Diet (TAD) in three different income-level neighborhoods in Los Angeles, California.

The research claimed that geospatially explicit ABMs of three neighborhoods were developed in Los Angeles that comprised varied socioeconomics and food environments with varying income levels - one lower-income (Boyle Heights), one middle-income (Inglewood), and one higher-income (Santa Monica).

Methods

The paper stated that it tested how well the virtual residents (represented by computational agents) could adhere to the MED-DASH compared to defaulting to TAD. To sum up the results of average dietary adherence levels among agents within each neighborhood, means and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for each diet scenario were used.

Results

The study claimed that adherence to the MED-DASH diet was on average 57.43 % (95% CI: 55.67%–59.19%) in the lower-income neighborhood, 62.39 (95% CI: 60.59–64.19%) in the middle-income neighborhood and 68.02% (95% CI: 66.21–69.82%) in the higher-income neighborhood.

It was further noted that decreasing by 50% the average price of foods that comprise the MED-DASH diet increased adherence by 17.24%, 10.36% and 1.88% in the neighborhoods, respectively.

“Clinicians and nutrition programs should routinely factor in where people live, what kinds of food outlets are nearby, and how much healthy food costs when giving dietary guidance or designing interventions,” said PHICOR Senior Analyst Jessie Heneghan, the study's lead author, according to Medical Xpress.

Kayla de la Haye, a co-author of the study and director of the USC Food Systems Institute in Los Angeles, said that moving towards precision nutrition is important because fewer than 2% of Americans eat a diet that is ideal for good health.

Conclusion

Overall, the study stated that the dietary recommendations, especially precision nutrition approaches, must take into consideration the surrounding food environment and ways to make suggested diets more feasible.