Study shows city's poor have greater access to fast food

A new study shows that poor people in Edmonton have a dramatically greater access to fast food than well-off families.

Fast food outlets in Edmonton are more often situated in neighbourhoods where there's high unemployment, low education rates and more renters than home owners. And the study's author says it's likely that obesity rates in those neighbourhoods are higher than average as well.

Eric Hemphill, who has just earned his Masters of Science in health promotion, says people living in the city's 45 poorest neighbourhoods are exposed to 2.7 times more fast food outlets than those living in the wealthiest 45 neighbourhoods.

Hemphill looked at availability of fast food at 762 outlets in 204 residential neighbourhoods, and examined five demographic variables in those neighbourhoods: the percentage of neighbourhood residents with low education and income, those who were unemployed, new Canadians, and those who rented rather than owned their homes.

He found a clear connection between concentration of fast food outlets and neighbourhoods where there are more low-income earners, lower education levels and a greater number of renters than home owners.

"Those variables are very good predictors of whether or not a neighbourhood will have high access to fast food," he said.

The highest concentration of fast food access appears to be in the downtown core, with 94 outlets; and residents of the west downtown neighbourhood of Oliver have access to 156 outlets, including those downtown. Some neighbourhoods, he noted, have no fast food outlets, particularly Riverbend, an upscale community on the city's southwest end.

"There are about 2.7 times as many fast food outlets in the poorer parts of the city, which is actually more significant than the findings in Australia," said Hemphill. "It surprised me."

Previous research has shown that low-income families are more prone to obesity, and access to fast food has been fingered as a culprit in American and Australian studies.

Data on obesity in Canada is scant, but it is known that obesity rates have nearly tripled between 1985 and 2003, rising to 14.9 per cent in 2003 from 5.6 per cent in 1985. And it is also known that the direct and indirect costs of obesity in Canada, including both health care costs and costs of lost production, are a staggering $4.3 billion per year.

"It's a major issue," said Hemphill, who used city planning documents, data from the 2001 federal census and figures from the Capital Health Region to find out if there is a link between obesity, socioeconomic status and fast food access in Edmonton.

While his present study offers tantalizing results, Hemphill stressed that more detailed research is required to make a direct connection between obesity rates and the availability of fast food here.

"Basically this is an exploratory, descriptive analysis of where fast food outlets are and if there is a relationship between placement and demographic variables," he said.

"We don't really know if living in a high-access area makes any difference but we now have a good idea of what the foodscape looks like in these areas," he said.

Funding for the study came from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada through the U of A Centre for Health Promotion Studies' Promotion of Optimal Weights through Ecological Research (POWER) Project.