A new study conducted by researchers from UCLA has found a direct link between outdoor fast food advertisements and obesity.
While past studies have linked obesity to fast food advertisements in magazines and on television, a new study has found a link between putting on weight and outdoor fast food advertisements. According to the study conducted by researchers from UCLA, neighborhoods that have more outdoor fast food and beverage advertisements tend to have more overweight residents.
"Obesity is a significant health problem, so we need to know the factors that contribute to the overeating of processed food," said Dr. Lenard Lesser, who conducted the research while a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the UCLA Department of Family Medicine and UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health. "Previous research has found that fast food ads are more prevalent in low-income, minority areas, and laboratory studies have shown that marketing gets people to eat more.
"This is one of the first studies to suggest an association between outdoor advertising and obesity." said Lesser, now a research physician at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute in California.
The study was carried out in two densely populated New Orleans and Los Angeles areas. Each place has a population of more than 2,000 people per square mile. The researchers looked into data including outdoor fast food advertisements in the area.
Telephone surveys were carried out on 2,600 people aged between 18 and 93. These people were asked health-related questions along with questions about their weight, height, body mass index (BMI) and soda consumption.
It was discovered that the higher the number of outdoor advertisement an area had, the higher were the odds of obesity. Since the study was conducted in only two areas, researchers have urged other organizations to take up similar studies in other areas to get a clearer picture of the correlation.
The findings were published online in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Public Health.
