communities are perceived by the residents as less safe, making parents more likely to reduce the physical activities of their children (Lumeng et al. 2006). Relatively poor neighborhoods are also significantly closer to fast-food restaurants (Reidpath et al. 2002) and farther away from health-food outlets (Ball et al. 2009), and their residents are more likely to rely on convenience stores as opposed to supermarkets for their produce (Bovell-Benjamin et al. 2009). In sum, an exhaustive accounting of the determinants of obesity requires detailed and longitudinal information about the built and social environment, including access to healthy food, physical space to exercise, social limits to outdoor activity (including neighborhood crime), local norms about exercise and body size, and local weather patterns (Faith and Kral 2006). However, educational attainment serves as a useful proxy for many of these more complex relationships.
