• Health status disparities
• logistic models
• minority health
• neighbourhoods
• obesity EPI
• RR
• social environment
• social epidemiology
• statistics ME

Bleich et al1 provide a novel examination of black–white disparities in women's health by comparing only women who live in two Baltimore census tracts that are integrated and low income, thereby controlling for social context and contemporaneous income. Many national and regional datasets include black and white women who tend to live in very different neighbourhoods due to systematic residential segregation, and unless the neighbourhood environment is controlled with fixed effects,2 3 disparities may be overestimated. The authors report that the obesity disparity is no …