Healthy Development Measurement Toolkit

Indicator PI.8.d Retail food environment index score

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Data Source

This dataset was purchased from ESRI (Redlands, CA), a private vendor, in Spring 2009. It includes all businesses for San Francisco. InfoUSA collects information on approximately 12 million private and public US companies. Individual businesses are located by address geocoding—not all will have an exact location. The ESRI geocoder integrates an address-based approach with more than forty million residential and commercial U.S. address records from the Tele Atlas Address Points database.

Map prepared by City and County of San Francisco, Department of Public Health, Environmental Health Section using ArcGIS software.

Table data is presented by planning neighborhood. While planning neighborhoods are larger geographic areas than census tracts, census tracts do not always lie completely within a planning neighborhood. Detailed information regarding geographic units of analysis, their definitions, and their boundaries can be found in the HDMT at the following links:

http://www.thehdmt.org/etc/Geographic_Units_of_Analysis.pdf

http://www.thehdmt.org/data_map_methods.php

Explanation and Limitations

The Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI) is a ratio describing the relative abundance of different types of retail food outlets in a given area. The RFEI is constructed by dividing the total number of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores by the total number of supermarkets and produce vendors (produce stores and farmers markets) in the area.  The result is the ratio of retail food outlets that offer little in the way of fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods to those in which fruits and vegetables are readily available. The higher the RFEI index, the more likely consumers will find unhealthy food options.  For this indicator, the RFEI was calculated for each of San Francisco's Planning Districts. 

The RFEI was developed for a study entitled "Searching for Healthy Food: The Food Landscape in California Cities and Counties", an analysis of the distribution of food outlets in the most populous cities and counties in the state, released by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy (CCPHA).  The report is available at: www.publichealthadvocacy.org/searchingforhealthyfood.html.

Why is this a Community Health Indicator?

Designed for Disease, The Link Between Local Food Environments and Obesity and Diabetes a study published by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, PolicyLink and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research in April of 2008, found a relationship between the Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI) and the likelihood of being obese or having diabetes. According to the study, California adults living in areas with an RFEI of 5.0 or higher had a 20% higher prevalence of obesity and a 23% higher prevalence of diabetes than their counterparts living in RFEI areas of 3.0 or lower. A higher RFEI was associated with a higher prevalence of obesity and diabetes for people living in lower-income and higher-income communities alike. The highest rates of obesity and diabetes are among people who live in lower-income and higher RFEI communities. This relationship between RFEI and obesity and diabetes rates was found to hold true regardless of household income, race/ethnicity, age, gender, or physical activity levels of respondents.^a