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Study questions obesity impact of South LA QSR ban
October 5, 2009
The South Los Angeles moratorium on fast food chain restaurants is unlikely to curb obesity rates in the area as lawmakers intended, a new Rand Corp. study has found.
The Los Angeles City Council last year approved a year-long ban on new or expanded quick-service restaurants within 32 square miles of the city, including Watts, Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills. According to the Los Angeles Times, that ban has been extended until March of next year.
The study found that the restrictions are not addressing the main differences between neighborhood food environments and are unlikely to improve the diet of residents or reduce obesity. Researchers from Rand Health also found that the South Los Angeles region has no more QSR chain stores on a per capita basis than other parts of the city, but rather many more small food stores and other food outlets.
Those outlets are more likely to be the source of high-calorie snacks and soda consumed substantially more often by residents of South Los Angeles as compared to other parts of the city, according to the study published online by the journal Health Affairs.
"The Los Angeles ordinance may have been an important first by being concerned with health outcomes, but it is not the most promising approach to lowering the high rate of obesity in South Los Angeles," said Roland Sturm, the study's lead author and a senior economist at Rand, a nonprofit research organization. "It does not address the main differences we see in the food environment between Los Angeles neighborhoods nor in the diet of residents."
The Los Angeles City Council's ordinance focused on QSRs characterized by "excessive signage, little or no landscaping, large expanses of surface parking, drive-thru windows, multiple driveways, parking lots fronting the street" and argued that the low-income region had a higher concentration of fast food establishments than more affluent sections of the city.
But an analysis by Sturm and study co-author Dr. Deborah Cohen found that South Los Angeles actually has a lower concentration of fast food chain restaurants than other parts of the city.
Researchers found there were about 19 QSR chain restaurants per 100,000 residents in South Los Angeles, while there were 29 per 100,000 people in affluent West Los Angeles and 30 per 100,000 residents for all of Los Angeles County. There are significantly fewer restaurants of any type per person in South Los Angeles compared to Los Angeles County overall, according to the study.
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