Brief CommunicationDo ‘food deserts’ influence fruit and vegetable consumption?—a cross-sectional study
Introduction
It has been asserted that ‘food deserts’, i.e. poor communities, where residents cannot buy affordable healthy food, are an important contributor to poor diet (Acheson, 1998). Whilst Cummings and Macintyre (2002) have discussed the lack of empirical evidence for this hypothesis, eradication of food deserts is an integral part of government policy aimed at reducing health inequalities (Food Poverty Eradication Act, 2001). We examined the relationship between access to supermarkets, fruit and vegetable prices, socio-economic deprivation and consumption of fruit and vegetables in a cross-sectional study in the Barnsley area of South Yorkshire.
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Methods
The sampling frame was a random selection of 1000 electoral roll addresses, equally distributed between four electoral wards. The wards were chosen to reflect diversity in grocery shopping facilities, material deprivation and level of urbanisation; two were urban wards whilst two were predominately rural. The two urban wards had Index of Multiple Deprivation scores (Index of Multiple Deprivation, 2000) of 55.5 and 51.1, and were both ranked in the most deprived decile of English wards (rank 374
Results
A total of 426 respondents provided complete information for the fruit regression model, their mean age was 50.7 years (SD 14.9), median fruit intake 2 portions/day (range 0–12, truncated at 6), median road travel distance to nearest supermarket 1.9 km (range 0.1–9.4 km). The corresponding figures for the vegetable model were 420 respondents, 50.5 years (SD 14.7), 2 servings/day (range 0–7, truncated at 6), 1.9 km (range 0.1–9.4 km).
Table 1 shows the results of the fruit and vegetable GLMs. Male
Discussion
These data suggest that the three key elements of a food desert, fruit and vegetable price, socio-economic deprivation and a lack of locally available supermarkets were not factors influencing fruit or vegetable intake. It seems that cultural influences including gender and age, as opposed to material factors such as poverty and distance to supermarkets, predominate in influencing consumption of fruit and vegetables.
This study is limited in that the sample was drawn from four of 22 wards. The
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council (project funding), Barnsley Dietetic Service (project support and facilitation), local community volunteers and groups (project support), all households and individuals who provided study data, Barnsley Chronicle (project publicity), Dr Ashley Adamson (independent peer reviewer) and those anonymous reviewers who have helped with drafts of this paper.
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