View this email in your browser

By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #43: Food deserts and unhealthy eating habits

Read previously-published Food and Health Facts here

“Food deserts” – a shorthand term for areas with few grocery stores – are often cited as an explanation for unhealthy eating habits among people living in those areas. But numerous studies in recent years have discounted that idea. (After a Washington Post food-policy columnist investigated the issue in 2018, she wrote that, “I have seldom found a body of evidence with results so relentlessly one-sided.”) According to one of the authors of the most recent comprehensive study – by professors at NYU, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, and the University of Pennsylvania – “when a supermarket opens in a food desert, people don’t suddenly go from shopping at an unhealthy convenience store to shopping at the new healthy supermarket. What happens is, people go from shopping at a far-away supermarket to a new supermarket nearby that offers the same types of groceries.”