Healthy food accessibility and obesity: Case study of Pennsylvania, USA

Obesity is a continuing challenge for any town, city or country faced with this problem. Being obese increases your risk of physical disorders such as high blood pressure (BP), high blood cholesterol, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer and poor reproductive health. Higher obesity rates also leads to increased economic burden on society. In order to better understand and control obesity rates the influence of various factors on its prevalence should be investigated. We used Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models to analyze spatial relationships using a combination of socio-economic and physical factor for counties in Pennsylvania (PA), USA for 2010. Our findings suggest that the rate of obesity is impacted by local spatial variation and its prevalence positively correlated with diabetes, physical inactivity and the distance that a person must travel to get to a healthy food store. Additionally, GWR (AICc = 261.59; r-squared = 0.45) was found to significantly improve model fitting over OLS (AICc = 299.87; r-squared = 0.34). These results indicate that additional factors, including social, cultural and behavioral, are needed to better explain the distribution of obesity rates across PA.