urban sociology

Burdette, Amy M., and Terrence D. Hill. "An Examination of Processes Linking Perceived Neighborhood Disorder and Obesity." Social Science & Medicine 67.1 (2008): 38-46. Web.In the journal article, An Examination of Processes Linking Perceived Neighborhood disorder and obesity, Burdette, Amy M. , and Terrence Hill used a data collected from a sample of Texas to figure it out why neighborhood disorder effect on obesity, and they also analysis the psychological, physiological, and behavior mechanism. They stated that psychological distress is a lynchpin mechanism that links neighborhood disorder with obesity risk, in this is because of stress response, diet with no quality, and lack of exercise. Studies keep confirming that population who lives in poor neighborhood, social disorganization, and disorder has more tendencies to be obesity. There are several factors these disadvantage neighborhood are more likely to be obese than the other ones, such as bad eating habits and they also don’t have courage to practice physical activity. The amount of fast food found in this neighborhood is intense; in contrast, it is found a restriction to health food, health center, gyms, and grocery store. Knowing the level of obesity being one quarter of Texas population, researchers tried to mediated by psychological, physiological, and behavioral mechanism
In this article they used Texas sample for adults and there is a large part of the population classified as obese. Finkelstein says, “In the state of Texas, obesity affects over one quarter of the adult population and accounts for more than $5 billion in medial expenditure each year,” a lot of money is invested in Texas for health care in obesity effects. They are also saying that living in a disadvantage neighborhood where they can find a lot of noise, dirt, crime and have a big impact in the psychological side of the human being. It is also noted that poor diet and those who don’t exercise can activate the physiological stress response and both of them causing risk of obesity. There are so many types of disorder that can be found in a poor neighborhood and in the research made by Gess and Ross they mention that residents complain about problems with crime, Vandalism, graffiti, drug use, trouble with neighbors. Neighbors feel like they are in danger, causing a lot of stress, also causing depression and anxiety.
Talking about the Psychological distress caused in poor neighborhood, Anton and Miller says that the risk of obesity can increase when people are too stressed and they start eating everything. They have poor eating habits; they can eat a lot of high calorie products, rich in sugar, salt and saturated fat, increasing the risk of obesity. Studies say that people that have bad eating habit have to satisfy their needs, in order to relax from the stressed caused by the disorder in the neighborhood. Another good factor that causes obesity is that this population is not motivated and educated to practice any sport or do any type of exercise. In the article, Anton and Miller says, “When individual are chronically sad and hopeless, they may be less likely to acquire the motivation to engage in regular physical activity. Obesity can also be related to others illness such as type-2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke and premature death. In order to know if someone is obese or not, researchers calculated body mass by dividing weight in pounds and height in inches squared and multiplying by 703 and if the result is bigger than 30, this person was obese.
Therefore, the authors used data from Texas to show that there are so many obesity in the state this article says that living in a disorder neighborhood can cause Psychological distress, and the population will have physiological distress, poor diet quality and irregular exercise habits and causing risk of obesity. Living in a stressed environment can cause a lot depression and anxiety, and elevating the risk of obesity in so many people.