Neighbourhood food typologies, fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing among adolescents in Melbourne, Australia

Objective: Despite the increased attention on neighbourhood food environments and dietary behaviours, studies focusing on adolescents are limited. This study aims to characterise typologies of food environments surrounding adolescents and their associations with fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing to/from school. Design: The number of food outlets (supermarket; green grocers; butcher/seafood/deli; bakeries; convenience stores; fast food/takeaways; cafe and restaurants) within a 1 km buffer from home was determined using a Geographic Information System. Adolescents' self-reported frequency of fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing to/from school. Latent Profile Analysis was conducted to identify typologies of the food environment. Cross-sectional multilevel logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationships between food typologies, fast food outlet visitations and snack food purchasing to/from school. Setting: Melbourne, Australia. Participants: Totally, 410 adolescents (mean age= 15 center dot 5 (sd = 1 center dot 5) years). Results: Four distinct typologies of food outlets were identified: (1) limited variety/low number; (2) some variety/low number; (3) high variety/medium number and (4) high variety/high number. Adolescents living in Typologies 1 and 2 had three times higher odds of visiting fast food outlets >= 1 per week (Typology 1: OR = 3 center dot 71, 95 % CI 1 center dot 23, 11 center dot 19; Typology 2: OR = 3 center dot 65, 95 % CI 1 center dot 21, 10 center dot 99) than those living in Typology 4. No evidence of association was found between typologies of the food environments and snack food purchasing behaviour to/from school among adolescents. Conclusion: Local government could emphasise an overall balance of food outlets when designing neighbourhoods to reduce propensity for fast food outlet visitation among adolescents.

Automated summary

This study examines the food environments surrounding adolescents and their associations with fast food visitation and snack food purchasing to/from school. The findings suggest that an overall balance of food outlets should be considered in neighborhood design to reduce adolescents' propensity for fast food outlet visitation.