Taking Neighborhood Health to Heart: Exploring Environmental and Social Barriers to Healthy Eating

Abstract

A food desert can be conceptualized as an unsupportive food environment where environmental and social barriers make access to affordable healthy food challenging (Cummins, et al., 2006; Glanz et al., 2005). A growing body of research links access to affordable healthy food with health and health inequities including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease (Story, et al., 2008), yet the majority of the research has focused on environmental variables (e.g. distance and price) with limited attention to social variables (e.g. preferred food store destination and reason for preference). The goal of our research project is deepen our understanding of food deserts by studying the relationship between health and access to healthy, affordable food and environmental and social variables. This research project comes out of a larger community-based participatory research initiative designed to collect and disseminate local-level health data in five contiguous neighborhoods in northeastern Denver, Colorado. The neighborhoods are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse. A 2009 comprehensive audit based on the USDA Community Food Security Assessment Toolkit (Cohen, 2002) of over 60 local food stores and retailers (all within a 1-mile radius of the five neighborhoods) revealed tremendous variability in availability, price and quality of fresh fruits and vegetables sold in these stores. We are now linking this information using ArcGIS 10 to household survey data on food consumption, food insecurity, and neighborhood perceptions conducted with a random sample of 1146 adult residents, as well as qualitative data from 18 neighborhood-level focus groups to provide context to the quantitative data and explore shopping habits. This research project adds to our understanding of how both environmental and social variables impact access to healthy affordable food.