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Background Obesity, a major risk factor for hypertension, diabetes, and other chronic diseases is influenced by a person’s local environmental setting. Accessibility to supermarkets has been shown to influence nutritional behaviors and obesity rates; however the specific local environmental conditions and behavioral mechanisms at work in this process remain unclear. Purpose To determine how individual fruit and vegetable consumption behavior was influenced by a distance decay based gravity model of neighborhood geographic accessibility to supermarkets, across neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, independent of other factors that are known to influence nutritional behaviors. Methods A distance decay based accessibility model (gravity model) was specified for a large sample (n=7,514) of urban residents. The associations between their fruit and vegetable consumption patterns and their local accessibility to supermarkets were explored, while controlling for covariates known to influence eating behaviors. Results Significant variation in geographic accessibility and nutritional behavior existed by age, gender, race and ethnicity, education, marital status, poverty status, neighborhood safety and knowledge of nutritional guidelines. Logistic regression showed an independent effect of geographic accessibility to supermarkets, even after the inclusion of known controlling factors. Conclusion A basic gravity model was an effective predictor of fruit and vegetable consumption in an urban population, setting the stage for inclusion of supply and demand parameters, and the ability to estimate local directions and magnitudes of the factors that contribute to the differential obesity rates found in United States urban areas. This knowledge will facilitate more targeted interventions that can help eliminate health disparities.

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is a research cartographer and a professor in the geography department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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