Brief reportsMcDonald’s Restaurants and Neighborhood Deprivation in Scotland and England
Section snippets
Background
The prevalence of obesity in developed countries has rapidly increased in recent years.1 It has been proposed that environmental, rather than genetic, influences may be the most important factors predicting increasing rates of overweight and obesity.2, 3, 4 Multilevel cross-sectional studies have found positive associations between the prevalence of adult overweight and obesity and neighborhood deprivation after adjusting for a range of individual sociodemographic measures5, 6, 7; consequently,
Methods
Every McDonald’s restaurant listed in the online Yellow Pages12 for Scotland and England was identified (n=942) as of January 2005. (Welsh and Irish McDonald’s restaurants were not identified, as up-to-date multiple deprivation indicators were not then available in Wales or Ireland.) The full unit postal code was obtained for each restaurant, which was then assigned an Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) score by linking the location of outlets to the relevant census “data zones” (Scotland)13
Results
Table 1 shows the mean number of McDonald’s restaurants per 1000 people by quintile for Scotland, England, and both countries combined. For English SOAs, there is a statistically significant (p<0.001) positive linear association between quintile of area deprivation and mean number of outlets per 1000 residents—as areas become more deprived, the mean number of outlets per 1000 people increases. For Scottish data zones, a similar relationship is observed (p<0.001), although Quintile 2 has a
Conclusions
Studies investigating neighborhood differences in overweight and obesity have found a greater prevalence of these conditions in more deprived neighborhoods, and have suggested that environmental promoters of obesity (such as access to fast food outlets) may be more common in these areas.5, 6 Two local case studies undertaken in the United States and Australia have indicated that such an association may exist.10, 11 Although restricted to one fast food chain, the results presented here represent
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