The Impact of the Environment on a Person’s Health
I want you to think about the decisions that you make every day in regards to your health. What factors of your life do you believe have been the biggest influence for your relationship with food and exercise? Do you think that the environment or personal agency plays the bigger role in someone’s decision to live a healthy (or unhealthy) lifestyle?
There is a common belief that obesity is strictly the result of poor personal decisions related to food and exercise. A counter-argument would be that the environment and healthy resources available in a community have a bigger impact on the health of its people. If there is a limited supply of healthy resources nearby, it would negatively impact people’s well-being; whereas, if there is an abundance, the health of the people would be significantly better. The USDA’s Food Environment Atlas helps people to understand the significant influence the environment has on a person’s health. The objective of the Atlas is to assemble statistics to stimulate research on the determinants of food choices and diet quality. These statistics include indicators of a community’s ability to access healthy, affordable food; indicators of a community’s success in maintaining healthy diets; and indicators of community characteristics that might influence the food environment (www.ers.usda.gov). With my analysis of the Food Environment Atlas, I wanted to know how much the environment surrounding a person ultimately affects their health.
To try to identify which environmental indicators played a significant role in the health of a community, I calculated the averages across all of the counties in the Food Environment Atlas and compared them to the top 25 counties with the highest and lowest obesity rates. Four factors that were drastically different between the counties with the highest and lowest obesity rates were the number of grocery stores, fitness facilities, population, and median household income.
Healthy living can be achieved without a gym, however, recreation centers are a place that is dedicated to the betterment of its people and make a healthy lifestyle more attainable. The average county in the US has 0.07 fitness facilities per 1,000 people. The counties with the lowest obesity rates is considerably higher than average with 0.18 facilities per 1,000 people, while those with the highest obesity rates is noticeably lower than the national average with 0.02 facilities.
The number of grocery stores present in a community was also very different between counties with the highest and lowest obesity rates. The average county has 0.25 grocery stores per 1,000 people. The counties with the highest obesity rates was equivalent to the national average at 0.25 grocery stores per 1,000 people. However, the counties with the lowest obesity rates have significantly more grocery stores in their community with an average of 0.36.
Whether a person lives in a small or large town has a big influence on the healthy resources they have access to. According to the Food Environment Atlas, the average county in the US has 102,841 people. The lowest obesity rate counties averaged more than double the national average at 208,139 people, while the counties with the highest obesity rates averaged considerably lower at 17,052 people.
The most prominent difference I found between counties with high and low obesity rates is the median household income. The average household income in the US, according to the Atlas, is $48,611. The median household income for counties with the highest obesity is drastically lower at $29,673, and the counties with the lowest obesity have an income that is significantly higher at $68,942.
In conclusion, although people have the agency to make choices that will either benefit or hinder their health, the environment and resources available in their community have a strong influence on their well-being. It is important to teach people how to take care of and properly nurture their bodies, but if they are not provided with the tools to do so, making these changes is incredibly difficult. It would be beneficial to focus on better equipping communities with health-friendly resources, such as fitness centers and stores to buy fresh food and produce. I understand that many of the communities struggling with obesity are small towns with limited money, but it’s still possible to reallocate their already existing resources to those that are more beneficial to the health of those in their community.
