Outdoor Food Advertising Allegedly Linked to Obesity Risk
A recent study has reportedly identified “a relationship between the percentage of outdoor food advertising and overweight/obesity.” Lenard Lesser, “Outdoor advertising, obesity, and soda consumption: a cross-sectional study,” BMC Public Health, January 2013. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the study relied on telephone survey data on adults aged 18 to 98 years “collected from 220 census tracts in Los Angeles and Louisiana,” comparing “self-reported information on BMI and soda consumption with a database of directly observed outdoor advertisements.”
The results evidently showed that “the higher the percentage of outdoor advertisements promoting food or non-alcoholic beverages within a census tract, the greater the odds of obesity among its residents, controlling for age, race and educational status.” In particular, the study reported that “for every 10% increase in food advertising, there was a 1.05… greater odds of being overweight or obese,” so that “compared to an individual living in areas with no food ads, those living in areas in which 30% of ads were for food would have a 2.6% increase in the probability of being obese.”
“[T]he summary of research in other areas points to an effect of outdoor advertising on the intentions of viewers of those ads. This analysis finds parallel results to the previous research on alcohol, tobacco, and food: those who live in areas with higher percentages of food advertising have a greater odds of obesity than those living in areas with a lower percentage of food ads,” concluded the study’s authors, who nevertheless noted the limitations of their research insofar as it was unable to determine which survey respondents were actually exposed to the advertisements during a given time period. “The reasonable way to prove a causal relationship would be to reduce outdoor food advertising in certain neighborhoods and determine whether obesity rates change. Given the health crisis associated with obesity, such measures may be warranted.”
