Availability of healthy foods and dietary patterns: The multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis

Background: Inadequate availability of healthy foods may be a bar-rier to achieving recommended diets. Objective: The objective was to study the association between the directly measured availability of healthy foods and diet quality. Design: We conducted a cross-sectional study of 759 participants from the Baltimore site of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclero-sis. Diet was characterized by using a food-frequency questionnaire and summarized by using 2 empirically derived dietary patterns reflecting low- and high-quality diets. For each participant, the availability of healthy foods was directly assessed by using 3 meas-ures: in all food stores within their census tract, in their closest food store, and in all food stores within 1 mile (1.6 km) of their resi-dence. Results: Twenty-four percent of the black participants lived in neigh-borhoodswith a low availability of healthy food comparedwith 5%of white participants (P, 0.01). After adjustment for age, sex, income, and education, a lower availability of healthy foods in the tract of residence or in the closest store was associated with higher scores on the low-quality dietary pattern (P, 0.05). Less consistent associ-ations were observed for the high-quality dietary pattern. Conclusions: Healthy foods were less available for black partici-pants. Low availability of healthy foods was associated with a lower-quality diet. The extent to which improvements in the availability of healthy foods results in higher-quality diets deserves further inves-tigation. Am J Clin Nutr 2009;89:897–904