No place to walk? Live closer to a McDonald's than a supermarket? Your 'obesogenic environment' can affect your weight.
Take a mental wander around your neighborhood: What do you see? Are there sidewalks to stroll on? Which is closer, a convenience store, fast food restaurant or a grocery store? Depending on your answers, you may be living in what experts refer to as an 'obesogenic environment.' In other words, your immediate surroundings may be making it harder to eat a nutritious diet or get much exercise, putting you at risk for excess weight gain.
How do you know if you're living somewhere that may be compromising your health, and what can you do about it? Here's what to watch for.
'An obesogenic environment is one that very easily supports a positive energy balance — that's a technical way of saying you end up taking in more calories than you expend on a daily basis,' Dr. Jamy Ard, a Wake Forest University School of Medicine obesity researcher, tells Yahoo Life. 'That makes it easier for weight gain to occur.'
If you're familiar with calorie restriction, you know how this works. In addition to harder-to-control factors like your metabolism, age and hormonal imbalances, weight is to some degree a function of how many calories a person consumes (positive energy) versus how many they burn through physical (and mental) activity. When the world around you makes it easy to eat — especially high-calorie foods that don't make you feel very full — and hard to exercise, you're living in an obesogenic environment.
Our modern American world has become more obesogenic by this definition. Feeding yourself and your family used to require more physical effort, says Ard — including farming your own food. The dawn of supermarkets and convenience foods (think: TV dinners) in the 1950s greatly reduced the amount of effort people had to expend to prepare meals. Supermarkets also give shoppers the opportunity to pick their own grocery items; before, you would hand your shopping list to a clerk who would pick and pack your purchases for you. These modern, so-called self-service stores paved the way for food brands to tempt shoppers with eye-catching labels, supersized packaging and, in some cases, deceptive health claims.
Now, with the help of apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, you don't even need to leave your couch to make dinner happen. That's one of the 'obvious' ways our environment has become more obesogenic, but some are more subtle, explains Ard. 'They didn't use to sell sodas in 12 ounces or 20 ounces; the most you could get was an eight-ounce serving,' he points out. 'We tend to eat [or drink] more when presented with larger portions.'
But it's not just the ease of food delivery or widespread availability of fast food, Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, an obesity and lipid specialist, tells Yahoo Life. 'Even at the grocery store, we do have whole, less processed foods, but there are still more highly processed foods,' he says. Potato and tortilla chips, he notes, are ubiquitous in the American foodscape. They're also carefully engineered to taste delicious and 'totally bypass your satiety signals,' or your body's sense of when it's full. 'In the U.S., you're pretty much surrounded by the obesogenic environment, and it's really hard to escape, but you can create your own personal environment as much as possible to try to battle back,' says Nadolsky.
More than 17% of Americans — about 53.6 million people — live in food deserts, low-income areas where the nearest supermarket is more than a 10-mile drive or a half-mile walk away. In these areas, fast food restaurants or convenience stores are often closer at hand, meaning high-calorie, low-nutrient snacks and meals are easier to come by than fresh produce. But even outside of food deserts, a 2016 study found, the number of fast food meals a city-dweller ate per week increased by 30% for each mile further they lived from a supermarket.
Obesogenic environments aren't just a product of the food available. 'They also include an environment that is less conducive to physical activity and more conducive to a sedentary lifestyle,' says Nadolsky. Sidewalks for walking, bike lanes for cycling and parks all make it easier to exercise. But it's not that these features simply need to exist, Ard notes, neighborhoods also need to be safe enough for people to take advantage of them, he says.
As more Americans have become reliant on cars, the distance we walk from transportation to the office has become shorter — or become nonexistent during some or all of the workweek — for the 12% of Americans who work remotely and 29% who work hybrid jobs. Moreover, jobs that require very little movement have become more common. By 2016, 80% of Americans were working sedentary desk jobs or in light-activity positions, a figure that had been rising for the previous 60 years. Ard says his patients see the difference when they switch away from more active jobs, or at least jobs that require a commute. 'In my clinic, people say, 'I changed jobs, I went from working on the floor and I got my 10,000 steps very easily to a more administrative job behind a desk,'' he says. Whereas active commutes used to be built into our days, many workers now have to make an effort to move more, Ard explains.
According to Ard, the 'mantra' of public health is to 'make the healthy choice the easy choice.' Most of those choices are in the hands of companies who market cheap-to-make junk foods, the regulators who let them and the political officials or private developers who decide not to build sidewalks. But you can take a few steps to encourage yourself to make healthier choices, our experts say.
These are prompts that remind us of the goals that we have, and our desire to follow through on them, says Ard. 'A lot of it is about goal-setting and setting up appropriate motivators and knowing what the reward looks like for you,' he says. Maybe seeing your blood pressure levels improve is reward enough, or perhaps you need a more tangible treat, like a bit of dark chocolate after a day of healthy food choices or new jeans to celebrate hitting your goal weight. These rewards can help keep you motivated, says Ard, though he notes, with frustration, that 'it shouldn't be such a willpower battle or require a behavioral intervention to not gain weight in this world.'
Finding small opportunities to work a little exercise into your day can make a big difference. Ard suggests parking a little further from a store entrance; taking the stairs or carrying your groceries (instead of using a cart) are other forms of incidental exercise that can add up.
Since grocery stores are full of shiny packages of low-nutrient, high-fat and super-tasty snacks, Ard recommends never entering them without a grocery list. Include only what you need, and stick to your list so you're not tempted to make an unplanned purchase. 'Those impulse purchases are a lot more likely to be unhealthy,' he explains. If you really struggle to resist tempting treats when you go into the store, Ard recommends online shopping.
Just because your job doesn't require you to be on your feet doesn't necessarily mean that you can't be up and about while you do it. Working from a standing desk can help you avoid sitting down all day. Ard is also a proponent of walking meetings, where you talk on the go instead of sitting in a conference room or being glued to Zoom.
'Try to surround yourself with whole, unprocessed foods as much as possible at home and at work,' advises Nadolsky. This way, you can use convenience to your advantage. When you're craving an afternoon snack, you'll be more likely to reach for the baby carrots in your fridge or almonds in your pantry than to drive to a fast food restaurant or corner store.
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