When you’re looking for your next home or apartment, odds are you’re pretty focused on two main things – the property itself and its location in relation to pertinent places in your life, like your child’s school or your workplace. However, new research says you may also want to consider what businesses are nearby, because it may affect your waistline.
Gyms, Fast Food and Where You Live
According to research conducted by researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, living close to gyms or fast food restaurants can have a direct impact on your waistline. Researchers found that individuals who lived in an area with six or more activity facilities were more likely to have a lower body mass index, lower body fat percentage and a smaller waist circumference than individuals who did not live close to any of these facilities. For the sake of the study, “activity facilities” were considered locations for sports or leisure activities, like gyms, pools, parks and fields.
There was also evidence, although not quite as strong, that living closer to fast food restaurants was linked to a larger waistline than individuals who lived further from these establishments. For example, researchers noted that people living at least 1.24 miles away from any fast food restaurant reported smaller waistlines than people who lived within 0.3 miles of a fast food establishment, but the average difference was only 0.1-0.2 inches.
“The results of our study suggest that increasing access to local physical activity facilities and, possibly, reducing access to fast food close to residential areas could reduce overweight and obesity at the population level,” said Kate E. Mason, MPH and PhD candidate, who worked on the study. “Designing and planning cities in a way that better facilitates healthy lifestyles may be beneficial and should be considered as part of wider obesity prevention programs.”
City Planning
According to Mason, cities should consider taking a closer look at where fast food restaurants are trying to stake their claim, and they should consider incentivizing other business for opening in certain locations.
“[Waistlines] could be improved by restricting the number of new fast food outlets in a neighborhood and how close they can be to people’s homes, incentivizing operators of physical activity facilities to open in residential areas with few facilities, or funding local authorities to provide such facilities,” said Mason.
She concluded by saying that cities and policymakers should recognize the importance of “tackling unhealthy built environments,” and that “around the world, urbanization is recognized as a key driver of obesity, and certain features of neighborhoods are likely to add to this, including a prevalence of fast food outlets and whether we have access to physical activity facilities. These aspects are often unequally distributed and might partly explain persistent social and geographical inequalities in obesity.”