The joint effects of family risk of obesity and neighborhood environment on obesity among women
Section snippets
Background
A social ecological approach to chronic disease and health outcomes guides our understanding of obesity risk by identifying many potential factors that contribute to unhealthy weight (Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994). Biological, genetic and social factors present throughout the life course independently, cumulatively, and interactively may affect obesity risk (Kuh et al., 2003). In the past decade, a large body of work on such gene-environment (GxE) interaction has emerged to investigate the
Data and methods
The data for our analysis are derived from women living in Salt Lake County, Utah who had a live birth between 1995 and 2005. Salt Lake County is an advantageous setting for this study for three reasons. First, it is an urban county containing 567 census block groups that vary in terms of walkability features. Second, Utahns’ average household size and total fertility rate have both been above the national average for more than 50 years (Kem, 2016, Sturgill and Heaton, 2006). This means that
Results
Descriptive statistics are presented in Table 1. The average BMI among these women is 24 and their average age is 28. Approximately 14% are obese based on the cut-points as defined by the Centers for Disease Control classification. This is somewhat less than estimates of obesity among adult women of all ages in national data sources such as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (Ogden et al., 2014). But, it is closer to the overall adult obesity rate in Utah in 2000 which was
Discussion
The aim of this paper was to consider potential interactive relationships between a familial susceptibility for high BMI and neighborhood walkability. A social ecological perspective leads us to consider how family background and social factors interact to influence body weight of women. Family background might predispose women to have a higher obesity risk in adulthood but neighborhood environment might have the ability to attenuate the potential deleterious effects of such family risk
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