Neighborhood food typologies, fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing among adolescents in Melbourne, Australia

Objective: Despite the increased attention on neighborhood food environments and dietary behaviors, studies focusing on adolescents are limited. This study aims to characterize typologies of food environments surrounding adolescents and their associations with fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing to/from school. Design: The number of food outlets (supermarket; green grocers; butcher/seafood/deli; bakeries; convenience stores; fast food/takeaways; café and restaurants) within a 1km buffer from home were determined using a Geographic Information System. Adolescents self-reported frequency of fast food outlet visitation and snack food purchasing to/from school. Latent Profile Analysis was conducted to identify typologies of the food environment. Cross-sectional multilevel logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine the relationships between food typologies, fast food outlet visitations and snack food purchasing to/from school. Setting: Melbourne, Australia Participants: 410 adolescents (mean age= 15.5 (SD=1.5) years) Results: Four distinct typologies of food outlets were identified: 1) limited variety/low number; 2) some variety/low number; 3) high variety/medium number; 4) high variety/high number. Adolescents living in Typologies 1 and 2 had three times higher odds of visiting fast food outlets ≥1 per week (Typology 1: OR= 3.71, 95%CI 1.23, 11.19; Typology 2: OR= 3.65, 95% CI 1.21, 10.99) than those living in Typology 4. No evidence of association was found between typologies of the food environments and snack food purchasing behavior to/from school among adolescents. Conclusion: Local government could emphasize an overall balance of food outlets when designing neighborhoods to reduce propensity for fast food outlet visitation among adolescents.