Abstract
Despite the increased attention on neighbourhood food environments and dietary behaviours, studies focusing on adolescents are limited. This study aims to characterise typologies of food environments surrounding adolescents and their associations with fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing to/from school. The number of food outlets (supermarket; green grocers; butcher/seafood/deli; bakeries; convenience stores; fast food/takeaways; café and restaurants) within a 1 km buffer from home was determined using a Geographic Information System. Adolescents' self-reported frequency of fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing to/from school. Latent Profile Analysis was conducted to identify typologies of the food environment. Cross-sectional multilevel logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationships between food typologies, fast food outlet visitations and snack food purchasing to/from school. Melbourne, Australia. Totally, 410 adolescents (mean age= 15·5 (sd = 1·5) years). Four distinct typologies of food outlets were identified: (1) limited variety/low number; (2) some variety/low number; (3) high variety/medium number and (4) high variety/high number. Adolescents living in Typologies 1 and 2 had three times higher odds of visiting fast food outlets ≥1 per week (Typology 1: OR = 3·71, 95 % CI 1·23, 11·19; Typology 2: OR = 3·65, 95 % CI 1·21, 10·99) than those living in Typology 4. No evidence of association was found between typologies of the food environments and snack food purchasing behaviour to/from school among adolescents. Local government could emphasise an overall balance of food outlets when designing neighbourhoods to reduce propensity for fast food outlet visitation among adolescents.
Highlights
This study aimed to examine associations between typologies of neighbourhood food environments and fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing behaviour among adolescents living in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia
Neighbourhood food typologies The six and five class solutions had the best fit based on the Akaike Information Criteria, Bayesian Information Criterion and the log likelihood values (Table 1)
We found that adolescents living in neighbourhoods characterised as Typologies 1 and 2 were much more likely to visit fast food outlets once a week or more compared with those living in Typology 4, which had the widest variety and the greatest abundance of each type of outlet
Summary
This study uses data from the Neighborhood Activity in Youth (NEArbY) study conducted between August 2014 and December 2015 among adolescents residing in Melbourne, Australia. The NEArbY study is part of the multicounty International Physical Activity and the Environment Network Adolescent project[31]. The selection of schools was based on statistical area level 1 (SA1) walkability and income quadrants in order to maximise heterogeneity in built environment and socio-economic position. Eighteen of 137 invited secondary schools consented to participate (18 % response rate). Participating schools selected year levels between years 7 and 12 to take part, and students were given a recruitment package, which consists of the study information, a parent survey and a consent form. 468 students completed an online survey at school and 473 had their residential addresses geocoded
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