NYC Politician: Restrict Fast Food in Poor Areas

NEW YORK (April 2) -- New York City has become an inhospitable environment for junk food. In 2006, the city banned trans-fats. Last fall, the New York City Education Department banned bake sales at its schools. And now, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is picking up the anti-junk-food banner by suggesting the city's zoning regulations be re-written to keep fast-food restaurants out of poor neighborhoods.

The obesity epidemic in New York is no secret. Childhood obesity has doubled in the past 25 years; today nearly 40 percent of the city's public school elementary kids are overweight or obese, according to a recent study comparing London and New York. The problem is worst in poor neighborhoods, where one-third of teenagers are overweight or obese.

The researchers who conducted the study, based at the City University of New York and the London Metropolitan University, recommended cities use zoning laws to limit children's access to unhealthy foods while increasing the availability of healthy foods.

New York voters would have to approve any zoning changes.

A similar measure was put in place in Los Angeles in July 2008, when the city council voted to keep any new fast-food restaurants from opening in a 32-square-mile area home to 500,000 people. The councilwoman who pushed for the bill, Jan Perry, told the Los Angeles Times that the idea was to give the city time to find a way to encourage more sit-down restaurants in the low-income area.

"I believe this is a victory for the people of South and southeast Los Angeles, for them to have greater food options," Perry told the L.A. Times.

But a study conducted by the RAND Corporation a year after the ban found that the premise of the measure was skewed. Though the south Los Angeles area did have higher rates of obesity than wealthier areas, it actually had fewer fast-food restaurants per capita.

In a survey of 1,480 adults, the researchers found that people in the south L.A. area ate higher-calorie snacks than the others interviewed. They attributed half the difference to soda intake alone. They also found that there were twice as many small corner grocery stores in the area than the county average and more than three times as many as in wealthier west L.A.

"It's about the constant availability of snack items. We're wired that we want to eat," Roland Sturm, one of the authors of the study, told AOL News. "If you have stores there that sell snack items every three of four steps, then the temptation is there."