Socioeconomic Disparities in the Community Food Environment of a Medium-Sized City of Brazil

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this ecological study was to characterize the community food environment according to the socioeconomic condition of census tracts (CTs) in the urban area of a medium-sized city of southeastern Brazil in 2016.

Method: Food establishments were identified on the streets covered by raters and information about type was collected through objective assessment. Geocoding was carried out from address observed by raters. Food establishments were categorized into establishments with predominant sale of natural or minimally processed foods, mixed establishments, and establishments with predominant sale of ultra-processed foods. The distribution of the number of establishments, by category, was evaluated according to tertiles of per capita income of the CT. The kernel estimation was used to analyze the density of establishments by category. The spatial pattern of the categories of establishments was investigated using the univariate Ripley’s K-function.

Results: A total of 656 establishments were evaluated. In all, 11.1% had predominant sale of natural or minimally processed foods, 44.5% were mixed, and 44.4% had predominant sale of ultra-processed foods. The average of establishments with predominant sale of natural or minimally processed foods, of ultra-processed foods, and all categories increased according to the income of the CT. There was a clustering of all categories of establishments in high-income CTs downtown. However, peripheral and low-income CTs were composed of a higher number of mixed establishments or those with predominant sale of ultra-processed foods than establishments with predominant sale of natural or minimally processed foods.

Conclusions: On average, the number of all categories of establishments increased according to the per capita income of the CT and were clustered in central and higher-income regions of the city. These findings may have practical implications for the development of public policies to increase the availability of healthy foods and to reduce the sale of unhealthy foods.

Keywords:

• Food environment
• socioeconomic factors
• disparities
• neighborhood
• food stores

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the undergraduate students at the Federal University of Viçosa for their contribution to data collection.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development under grant number 458523/2014-3.