Food and Obesity

Access to healthy food and obesity are often linked. Basically, the most obese counties tend to be the poorest and where people rely more heavily on fast food. It's cheaper to eat poorly than it is to eat healthy.

So let's look at Georgia and how the 159 counties rank in terms of available food quality and obesity and see if it holds. Look at the table below. In the left column I've ranked the Top 10 worst in terms of "food environment," a measure of access to healthy food. The right column reflect each county's rank in terms of obesity out of all 159 Georgia counties. Discussion below the table.

Ranked Worst in Food Environment	Rank out of 159 In Obesity Measure
Taliaferro	82nd
Baker	108th
Dougherty	26th
Marion	52nd
Hancock	88th
Quitman	32nd
Crisp	90th
Clarke	157th
Macon	4th
Clayton	1st

A couple of things jump right out. Clayton County is 10th in lousy access to healthy food and 1st in terms of obesity, and most of the Top Ten food counties are in the upper ranks of obesity, the exception being Clarke County, where I live and home of UGA. I suspect students are affecting the results here, both in lots of fast food and lots of fit people (sigh ... I'm always a year older, they're always 20).

For the statisticians out there, the correlation between lousy food and obesity is .38, which is a moderately strong but not overwhelming relationship. Poverty, of course, is a huge predictor of food environment and the best food environment counties are, no surprise, the least poor. There's a .40 correlation between obesity and income in the data.

With more time and motivation it'd be fun to run a regression and control for lots of factors and see which ones truly pop out as significant.