March 19/NewsRx Health & Science -- The availability of healthy food choices and the quality of diet are associated with where you live, according to two studies conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Researchers examined healthy food availability and diet quality among Baltimore City and Baltimore County, Md., residents and found that availability of healthy foods was associated with quality of diet, and 46% of lower-income neighborhoods had a low availability of healthy foods. The results are published in the March 2009 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and the December 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
"Place of residence plays a larger role in dietary health than previously estimated," said Manuel Franco, MD, PhD, lead author of the studies and an associate with the Bloomberg School's Department of Epidemiology. "Our findings show that participants who live in neighborhoods with low healthy food availability are at an increased risk of consuming a lower quality diet. We also found that 24% of the black participants lived in neighborhoods with a low availability of healthy food, compared with 5% of white participants."