(24-06-09) Live near fast food? Obesity risk is greater

But there's a catch to Canadian results: U.S. study finds the opposite

By Tom Spears, The Ottawa CitizenJune 18, 2009

Two universities set out to investigate what looked like a slam-dunk idea: That people who live near a lot of fast-food restaurants are more likely to be obese.

That's exactly what the University of Alberta did find, in a study released this week.

But it's just the opposite of what a university in Indiana found in a separate study, also reported this week.

The split illustrates how getting to the heart of a scientific problem can be tricky for even the most experienced researcher. And it applies to a new study now under way in Ottawa.

"It just highlights the need for something we call meta-analysis, so bringing all the studies together, gathering all the evidence," says Elizabeth Kristjansson of the University of Ottawa. She's a community psychologist with a special interest in epidemiology -- patterns of health in populations.

"More and more, people are realizing that one study doesn't do it. And that's why people like myself do what we call systematic reviews, a standardized way of searching for all the evidence that's valid ... and then combining them in order to come up with what is actually happening."

Kristjansson is about to study Ottawa's relationship with the foods we eat, in a new phase of the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study.

"That's my plan for the summer -- to run all kinds of analyses on the relationship of food, of parks and recreation, of green space, of bike paths" to the health of people living in each area, she said.

This will include health issues such as obesity, and aspects of lifestyle such as whether a neighbourhood has good access to exercise and sources of healthy food.

She said it's too early to conclude whether certain Ottawa neighbourhoods are less healthy due to the presence of too much fast food or too few grocery stores.

The study will cover the whole municipality, drawing heavily on the city's public-health officials and the University of Ottawa's Institute of Population Health.

Results could be ready by September or October, but may not be released until they've been reviewed by a scientific journal, she said.

Similar studies are rare in Canada, she added.

In the future, she said she hopes to focus on rural parts of the region.

"We haven't quite captured the rural areas adequately. And that's because of the necessity of having a large enough population to have statistics," which forced them to lump together large areas that should have been addressed separately.

A Tale of Two Studies

- The University of Alberta found that residents of an area with more fast food outlets and convenience stores than supermarkets and grocers are more likely to be obese. It adds that 'these findings may help explain the observation that geographic concentration of fast-food restaurants is associated with mortality and hospital admissions for acute coronary events in Canada.'

- Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis researchers studied the effect of fast-food restaurants on the weight of children in poor neighbourhoods of Indianapolis. They didn't study adults.'Living near a fast food outlet had little effect on weight and living near a supermarket did not lower it,' they reported. They say this 'contradicts the conventional wisdom.'

Source:The Ottawa Citizen

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