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The Food Of Food And Its Effects On Health And Health

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. The term “food desert” was first defined by a British Low Income Project team as “areas of relative exclusion where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods”. (Reisig and Hobbiss). This description is in reference to the recent shift of food retailers away from urban areas into suburban developments. This is significant because it illustrates that where you live has a direct influence on access to food, and consequently, the quality of food readily available. Food deserts are often completely devoid of whole-food providing supermarkets and contain a substantial amount of convenience stores and fast food chains. Consequently, the area in which people live can have a dramatic effect on …show more content…

If the collected people within the census region is below 500 or the average housing with low access (beyond 1 mile) is at least 33 percent, then the census tract is considered a food desert (USDA-ERS). Over the past few decades, research on food deserts has become broader and has expanded into a more socio-economic project. The most common examinations have focused on systematically reviewing the evidence for food deserts, specifically focusing on socioeconomically disadvantaged regions. These districts are perhaps more alarming due to a process of “deprivation amplification”, which is the concept that poorer areas have fewer environmental and community resources; an observation that is proposed to be a factor in the existence of amplified household poverty. (Macintyre). There are various influences such as economics and demographics that can contribute to the occurrence of food deserts. These have been heavily researched and documented. Various studies commonly apply a blend of geographic and market-based approaches to examine the causes of food deserts throughout the world. Research in the United States has indicated that there is clear evidence for disparities in food access by income and race, however, findings from other high-income countries were sparse and ambiguous (Beaulac et.al.) The anomaly behind the findings in the food desert research throughout the United States could

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