Abstract
The public health status of the United States is in a critical state. Rates of overweight and obese children are on the rise in nearly every community in the nation, and obesity is quickly becoming a global problem as well. While there are many biological, cultural, and psychological factors that play into the rising rates, social factors as a cause of decreasing health are often overlooked. The “built environment,” or each community’s living, working, and eating spaces, plays a large role in determining the actions taken by individuals in a community. In this study, the built environments of two socioeconomically different neighborhoods in Nashville, Tennessee, are analyzed. The resulting data is compared to Tennessee state health census reports to posit that a decreased quality of food and physical activity related built environments parallels a rise in chronic health problems.Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (linked here). By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are available for wide dissemination at no cost to readers, with proper attribution (acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal), in educational and other non-commercial settings. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
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