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

Objective: Despite the increased attention on neighbourhood food environments and dietary behaviours, studies focusing on adolescents are limited. This study aims to characterise 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 1 km buffer from home was 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: Totally, 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 and (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 behaviour to/from school among adolescents.

Conclusion: Local government could emphasise an overall balance of food outlets when designing neighbourhoods to reduce propensity for fast food outlet visitation among adolescents.