GIS-based analysis of obesity and the built environment in the US

This paper examines the statewide relationship between built environment and obesity at the county scale by using the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) method. The independent variables include three built environment factors – street connectivity, walk score, fast-food/full-service restaurants ratio – and two sociodemographic variables, race heterogeneity and poverty rate. The urban influence is considered as a covariate in the analysis. Through the regression model we found that walk score and street connectivity are negatively related to obesity, poverty rate and metro are positively related, and the fast-food/full-service restaurants ratio is not significant. A regionalization method is used to group US counties to regions based on their GWR coefficients. Qualitative inferences of policies are made available to facilitate better understanding of the obesity problem associated with the built environment in these regions.