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We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com. Back to Healio Key takeaways: The number of food deserts \u2014 areas without grocery stores \u2014 in the U.S. stayed almost the same between 2003 and 2023. Conversely, the number of food swamps increased during the same time. Approximately 5 million people in the U.S. lived in communities with no access to grocery stores in 2023. The number of food deserts in the country remained almost unchanged during the past 2 decades, whereas the number of areas with substantially more restaurants and fast-food locations than supermarkets increased more than 8 percentage points during the same time.
Data derived from Wiese D, et al. Am J Public Health. 2026;doi:10.2105\/AJPH.2026.308495.
\u201cAlarming,\u201d Daniel Wiese, PhD, principal scientist in cancer disparity research at American Cancer Society, told Healio. \u201cWe might recommend people sustain a certain diet, but is it really possible?\u201d \u2018Dealing with this for decades\u2019 Prior research has shown poor diet is associated with numerous negative health outcomes, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease and obesity, according to study background. In the past year, Healio has reported extensively on the impact nutrition can have on health, including: However, patients do not always have the option of eating healthy foods. Many individuals live in food deserts, areas with no grocery stores, or food swamps, areas with dramatically more restaurants and fast-food eateries than supermarkets. A prior study showed people have between 11% and 61% greater likelihood of eating fast food with increased retailer density in their area. Conversely, another investigation showed that individuals ate more fresh produce for each extra supermarket in the neighborhood. Food deserts have been linked to elevated BMI, obesity, cardiovascular health risk and more diabetes-related hospitalizations. \u201cThat isn\u2019t new information,\u201d Wiese said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been dealing with this for decades, but what is interesting to see is whether anything has changed. It is critically important. We know how COVID-19 interrupted health care services, but did it interrupt anything related to the healthy food environment?\u201d Wiese and colleagues evaluated the U.S. foodscape between 2003 and 2023. Researchers defined foodscapes based on census tract. They defined geographic access to food retailers in three ways: a traditional half-mile buffer from the tract; 20-minute drivetime zones from tract centroid (about 6-10 miles in urban areas; 20 miles in rural areas); and 20-minute rides via public transit. \u2018It\u2019s not that easy\u2019 The overall number of food retailers increased 62.6% between 2003 and 2020 (756,668 to 1,208,797), but it declined to 1,067,984 in 2023. The number of unhealthy retailers increased 66% between 2003 and 2020 (623,738 to 1,035,370) and fell 11.2% (919,199) in 2023. The number of healthy retailers rose 30.4% from 2003 to 2020 (132,930 to 173,280) but declined 14.1% by 2023 (148,785). Growth in unhealthy retailers substantially outnumbered healthy retailers (47.4% vs. 11.9%). The number of food deserts fell 1.9 percentage points from 2003 to 2020 but rose 1.3 percentage points by 2023. \u201cIt\u2019s certainly [disappointing],\u201d Wiese said. \u201cWe\u2019ve known for so long about the existence of food deserts, I would expect that, over time, we might see some progress. There was an increase in supermarkets, so I thought we were going to see a decline in food deserts. That was not the case. The number of food deserts and the proportion of neighborhoods that were categorized as food deserts remained almost unchanged.\u201d The number of food swamps increased 9.6 percentage points between 2003 and 2020, but dropped 1.3 percentage points by 2023. \u201cWhat is concerning is that the number of restaurants and fast-food locations is going so much higher, it\u2019s rapidly increasing, and people are mostly exposed to getting foods from these places instead of going into a supermarket and buying healthy products to cook themselves,\u201d Wiese said. Rural areas had substantially more food deserts than urban areas (15.8% vs. 2.9%), but far less food swamps (66.8% vs. 93.8%). The number of tracts with \u201cgood food environments\u201d declined 7.7 percentage points \u2014 from 13.7% to 6% \u2014 between 2003 and 2020 and stayed at that level through 2023. Using the drivetime-based measure, 4.9 million individuals lived in food deserts in 2023. That number increased to 14 million using the distance-based definition, and 178 million with the public transit method. \u201cWe wish everyone would be able to maintain a healthy diet, but the environment where we live, the food environment that we\u2019re exposed to, can be a big limitation of that,\u201d Wiese said. \u201cPeople should focus on buying fresh produce, but it\u2019s not that easy. Many people have multiple barriers to deal with. People may need to walk for miles to find any grocery store. The attractiveness of fast-food places and restaurants also might change consumption behavior.\u201d Researchers acknowledged study limitations, including potential misclassification of retailers. Wiese and colleagues plan to further evaluate foodscapes in different contexts. \u201cIn many areas there will always be more restaurants and fast-food locations, so we\u2019re trying to calculate ratios per thousand people,\u201d he said. \u201cAdditionally, we are looking to expand this further to small-scale analyses. We have several sample sites, mostly cities like New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta and a few other places, where we now go into the block group level. We go even more granular and try to see what\u2019s happening on the ground there, and see if we can find any additional information or health outcomes that we can link to. Can we link residency in food swamps and food deserts to any negative health outcomes in the population?\u201d Wiese expressed some \u201chope\u201d for improvements in the future, noting some private-public partnerships that have brought supermarkets to underserved areas, as well as examples from other<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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