Obesity and Diabetes, the Built Environment, and the ‘Local’ Food Economy

Matthew Salois

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Obesity and diabetes are increasingly attributed to environmental factors, however, little attention has been paid to influence of the 'local' food economy. This paper examines the association of measures relating to the built environment and the ‘local’ food economy with county-level prevalence of obesity and diabetes. Key indicators of the ‘local’ food economy include the density of farmers’ markets, volume of direct farm sales, and presence of farm-to-school programs. This paper employs a robust regression estimator to account for non-normality of the data and to accommodate outliers. Overall, the built environment is strongly associated with prevalence of obesity and diabetes and a strong 'local' food economy may play an important role in prevention. Results imply considerable scope for community-level interventions.

Keywords: community-level intervention; diabetes; food environment; farmers market; leverage points; local food; robust regression; obesity; outliers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C10 I10 I12 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-hea and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27945/1/MPRA_paper_27945.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/28288/1/MPRA_paper_28288.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Obesity and Diabetes, the Built Environment, and the 'Local' Food Economy (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:27945

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().