Background: The increasing rates of obesity are closely linked to changes in eating habits, particularly a greater reliance on food consumed away from home. As people spend more on meals outside the home, it’s crucial to understand how access to different types of restaurants varies across communities.
Methods: To explore this issue, a study was conducted examining the relationship between the racial, ethnic, and income characteristics of local areas and the presence of both full-service and fast food restaurants. This research utilized a comprehensive U.S. national census covering 28,050 ZIP codes and over 280 million people. Restaurant data was combined with demographic information from the 2000 Census Bureau, and statistical analyses were performed to identify patterns and associations.
Results: The findings revealed that wealthier neighborhoods and areas with a predominantly white or Hispanic population tended to have more full-service and fast food restaurants compared to lower-income and predominantly Black or racially diverse neighborhoods. Interestingly, neighborhoods with near-low and middle-income levels showed the highest restaurant availability, having 1.24 and 1.22 times more full-service restaurants and 1.34 and 1.28 times more fast food restaurants than high-income areas. Specifically, predominantly Black neighborhoods had only about 58% to 59% of the number of both full-service and fast food restaurants found in predominantly white neighborhoods. Nationally, the study did not find significant differences in the proportion of fast food restaurants versus full-service restaurants across different income, racial, or ethnic groups. However, when focusing on urban areas alone, a different picture emerged. In urban settings, near-low, middle, and near-high-income neighborhoods, as well as predominantly Black neighborhoods, demonstrated a moderately higher proportion of fast food restaurants compared to total restaurants when contrasted with high-income and predominantly white neighborhoods.
Conclusions: The study highlights that in urban areas, the disproportionately higher presence of fast food restaurants in predominantly Black neighborhoods compared to predominantly white neighborhoods may be a contributing factor to the observed racial disparities in obesity rates. This suggests that the food environment, particularly access to fast food restaurants, could play a role in health inequalities across different communities.
