Document Type
Article
Abstract
Objective
The goal of the present study was to use a methodology that accurately and reliably describes the availability, price and quality of healthy foods at both the store and community levels using the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores (NEMS-S), to propose a spatial methodology for integrating these store and community data into measures for defining objective food access.
Setting
Two hundred and sixty-five retail food stores in and within 2 miles (3·2 km) of Flint, Michigan, USA, were mapped using ArcGIS mapping software.
Design
A survey based on the validated NEMS-S was conducted at each retail food store. Scores were assigned to each store based on a modified version of the NEMS-S scoring system and linked to the mapped locations of stores. Neighbourhood characteristics (race and socio-economic distress) were appended to each store. Finally, spatial and kernel density analyses were run on the mapped store scores to obtain healthy food density metrics.
Results
Regression analyses revealed that neighbourhoods with higher socio-economic distress had significantly lower dairy sub-scores compared with their lower-distress counterparts (β coefficient=−1·3; P=0·04). Additionally, supermarkets were present only in neighbourhoods with <60 % African-American population and low socio-economic distress. Two areas in Flint had an overall NEMS-S score of 0.
Conclusions
By identifying areas with poor access to healthy foods via a validated metric, this research can be used help local government and organizations target interventions to high-need areas. Furthermore, the methodology used for the survey and the mapping exercise can be replicated in other cities to provide comparable results.
Disciplines
Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics | Communication Technology and New Media | Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations | Food Security | Food Studies | Health Communication | Health Policy | Mass Communication | Nutritional Epidemiology | Public Policy | Social Media | Urban Studies | Urban Studies and Planning
Recommended Citation
Shaver, E. R., Sadler, R. C., Hill, A. B., Bell, K., Ray, M., Choy-Shin, J., ... & Jones, A. D. (2018). The Flint Food Store Survey: combining spatial analysis with a modified Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores (NEMS-S) to measure the community and consumer nutrition environments. Public Health Nutrition, 21(8), 1474 - 1485. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980017003950
Included in
Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons, Food Security Commons, Food Studies Commons, Health Communication Commons, Health Policy Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Nutritional Epidemiology Commons, Public Policy Commons, Social Media Commons, Urban Studies Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons
Comments
© The Author(s) 2018. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), and indicate if changes were made (no changes were made).