Surprise: Access to healthy food doesn't mean healthier kids

Here's an interesting research finding: despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, people who live in neighborhoods without access to fresh foods (sometimes called "food deserts") aren't significantly more likely to be obese than those who do have those choices. Other factors, such as age, gender, and the BMI of kids' parents are more influential in how fat the kids turn out to be.
That's according to a highly respected RAND Corporation study just published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.
Among the findings:

• The proximity of stores selling healthful food was limited for most study participants; 70% of families with children had no supermarkets within a half mile of home. Approximately 7% of participating families lived within a half mile of two or more supermarkets.
• The distance to fast food restaurants varied widely across the sample. While “45% of adolescents had no fast food restaurants in 10-minute walking distance, 28% had three or more in proximity from school.”
• The BMI of students was more closely related to gender, age, and their parents’ BMI than proximity to healthy food options. “Boys tend to consume less vegetables and fruits but more milk, fast food and soda than girls.”
• While adolescents typically consumed “considerably more soda, high sugar foods, and fast food” than their younger counterparts, the intake rates of juice, fruits and vegetables were approximately the same for both groups.
• Overall, the study “found no evidence to support the hypotheses that improved access to supermarkets, or less exposure to fast food restaurants or convenience stores within walking distance, improves diet quality or reduces BMI among Californian youth.”

Which diet is healthiest? Here's a new ranking

U.S. News & World Report has come up with "Best Diets for Healthy Eating," ranking 20 diets for their nutritional value and safeness. The highest score is 5, down to the worst at 1. The scores give safety double the weight of nutrition because  "while you can modify a diet to some degree to adjust for nutritional imbalances or deficiencies, mere tweaking won't make an unsafe diet safe," according to the magazine.
Here are the top 5 best diets:
1. DASH diet -- low in saturated fat and salt, very heart-healthy
2. Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC) diet -- almost as good as the DASH diet, according to the panel of experts that came up with the ratings. Good fiber and calcium content and also low in sat-fat.
3. Mediterranean diet -- also very healthy, with the added bonus of encouraging regular wine consumption (three cheers for that).
4. Mayo Clinic Diet -- interesting in that it promotes eating plenty of low-density foods, where you feel full for longer on less.
5. Volumetrics Diet -- similar to Mayo Clinic in its emphasis on low-density foods.

Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig come next, by the way, at #6 and #7.

To read details about how the rankings were done, and more about the diets themselves, click here.