Close-Knit Neighborhoods May Help Prevent Childhood Obesity
RAND | News Release | RAND Study Finds Close-Knit Neighborhoods May Help Prevent Children from Becoming Overweight
Adolescents living in close-knit neighborhoods where adults provide social support -- such as watching out for youngsters and seeking to correct their misbehavior -- are just half as likely to be overweight or nearly overweight as other children, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
"There is an obesity epidemic in this country and treatment has focused on diet and exercise with relatively little success," said Dr. Deborah Cohen, a RAND Health researcher and lead author of the study.
"These findings suggest that providing more social support to children at the neighborhood level, which was more common in the past, is a potentially successful strategy for reducing the incidence of obesity in young people in the future."
Neighborhoods with high levels of social support have been found to play a role in health problems related to obesity among adults, including premature death and cardiovascular disease.
The new RAND study, published in the February edition of the journal Social Science & Medicine, takes the premise a step further and examines the role that a neighborhood may have on adolescents' weight.
RAND Health is the nation's largest independent health policy research program, with a broad research portfolio that focuses on health care quality, costs and delivery, among other topics.
