Living in an obese community can impact your health, study finds
ALMOST two out of three Aussies are considered overweight or obese, and new research suggests it may be your postcode that’s to blame.
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CAN where you live determine whether or not you suffer from obesity? A new study suggests it can.
The research, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, claims that people who move to an area where obesity rates are high, have an increased risk of becoming overweight or obese themselves.
Obesity can lead to a gamut of health issues, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, some musculoskeletal conditions and even some cancers.
In Australia, 11.2 million (63.4 per cent) of Australian adults are considered overweight or obese (have a BMI of 25 or higher), according to 2014-15 statistics released by the government, while 1.2 million (26 per cent) Australia children and adolescents were overweight or obese.
Researchers from the University of Southern California believe that the link between where you live and obesity is a result of “social contagion”, which proposes that living in a community where obesity is prevalent, makes sedentary lifestyles, unhealthy eating and being overweight “more socially acceptable”.
However, other experts argue that this pattern may be due to people preferring to be around people who are like them (with similar backgrounds or interests) or that their shared environment, with access to the same foods and activities, may be what’s impacting their health.
“Assessing the relative importance of these explanations has been a challenging task and yet is important for designing effective policies to address obesity,” Ashlesha Datar, a senior economist at the USC and one of the study’s co-authors said.
The study examined the data of 1519 military families, including 1314 adults and 1111 children. Of the participants, three quarters of the parents were classified as overweight or obese, and one quarter of the children were overweight or obese.
The researchers found a family’s risk of obesity would rise or fall depending on where they lived.
“If you move a family from a typical county to one with a higher rate of obesity ... that would increase the parent’s chances of being obese by 25 per cent,” Ms Datar told USC News.
Similarly, a child’s chance of being overweight or obese would rise by 19 per cent, she said.
Meanwhile, moving to a place where obesity is less prevalent will lower the family’s risk.
Ms Datar said they took into account environmental factors as much as possible and believe that shared environments “did not play a critical role in explaining our results”.
She also ruled out that similar backgrounds and interests played a part. “Since military families are located in specific communities not of their own choice but to serve the military’s needs, our findings are also unlikely to be explained by the tendency of people with similar interests/backgrounds to locate in similar communities.”
The research team determined that the findings supported the idea that social contagion is linked to obesity.
“Our results suggest that military families assigned to installations in counties with higher obesity rates were more likely to be overweight and/or obese than their counterparts assigned to installations in counties with lower obesity rates,” the study’s authors wrote, according to AJP Online.
“The absence of evidence supporting self-selection or shared environment opens the possibility that social contagion may explain our findings.”
They also found that the longer a family was exposed to an obese community, the higher their risk of becoming obese.
Dr Ian Stephen, senior lecturer of psychology at Macquarie University says this may because your perception of “normal” weight changes depending on what you see around you.
“If you expose people to a whole series of fat bodies even for just a minute or two, then people’s perception of what normal is gets fatter, and vice versa,” he told News Corp.
“The work we’ve been doing basically suggests that if you live in a geographical area that is full of very overweight people then your perception of what a normal body looks like gets fatter.
“Then, when you look at yourself in the mirror, you see this normal weight person looking back even if you yourself are overweight,” he said.
Dr Stephen said his research suggests that there are “changes going on in the perceptual systems of your brain” when you are exposed to certain body shapes. “Your brain is calibrating to the size of bodies that you see around you,” he said. “That could be another reason, or at least another contributing factor, to why you get these geographical concentrations of obese people.”
The Australia’s Health Trackers map, which was released in 2016 by the Australian Health Policy Collaboration, reveals that your postcode can impact your weight, among other health issues.
While it reveals that Australia’s wealthiest postcodes are the healthiest postcodes, it shows the obesity is a problem that occurs across the board.
According to findings released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) last year, country South Australia had the highest rates of obesity in Australia, where 73.3 per cent of adults are classed as overweight, while Western NSW following closely behind with 71.1 per cent. Northern Sydney boasted the lowest obesity figures, however the statistics were still alarming with more than half (53.4 per cent) of adults deemed overweight.