Article Review: Food Deserts And Childhood Obesity?

Walk onto any college campus or any other type of school campus and you will see many students that are either obese or close to being obese. Many cafeterias serve healthy foods and non-healthy foods. Schools came up with the rule that you can’t check out lunch without a fruit or vegetable. The only problem is that most students end up taking them and end up wasting them by throwing them away. Considering I am a college student, I understand the challenge of eating unhealthy when I am trying to eat healthier. Overall, I know that if I don 't start eating healthier soon I could end up gaining a lot of weight and become obese. For this research project, I decided to ask, what can be done about the problem of obesity in our country? This question

Alviola IV, Rodolfo M. Nayga Jr., and Michael Thomsen to learn more about what food deserts and how they impact the society around them. I believed that this was a good source because it went into what food deserts are and how they might be connected to the increase of obesity. I learned that a food desert is an “area where access to healthy foods is limited or constrained” (Alviola 106). I also learned that studies have shown people who live in food deserts “are likely to pay higher prices for food and have limited options in terms of purchasing healthy foods” (Alviola 106). After reading this article I have realized that Xavier may also be in a food desert because the closest grocery store is Kroger whose produce is almost always non-fresh and does not look edible to eat which encourages people to leave and resort to eating fast food for every meal. Needing more information about the effects of Food Deserts I started to look at an article called, “The Effects of Food Deserts on the Weight Status of South Dakota Children”, written by Emily Niswanger, Elizabeth Droke, Suzanne Stluka, and Kuo-Liang Chang. I believed that this was a great next source to look into because the name of the article was exactly what I wanted to get more information about. The source was about one study that was made in the state of South Dakota to discover if food deserts do have an effect on

Desai, William C. Miller, Betty Staples and Terrill Bravender. I believed that this was a credible source because all of the authors have a medical degree. This article provided similar data saying that the percentage of people ages 12 to 19 who were overweight or obese rapidly increased from 5% to 17% between 1976 and 2002 (Desai 109). From this document I learned that college years are known to influence the forms of our adult behaviors including diet, physical activity, and other habits. Being a college student, I knew that college was going to change my work ethic and ability to do achieve new responsibilities but I did not know that it could actually greatly affect our weight. In the source it states that results from “both the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey" show that the transition to adulthood, a high number of people become obese and remain obese (Desai 109). One way I thought of this transformation was the freshman fifteen. The source was able to identify patterns of obesity but they still have not fully discovered examples of obese behaviors. However, the authors of this paper were able to perform a study to at least suggest some examples of behaviors related to obesity. They examined data collected from an electronic survey