![]() ![]() ![]() This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: This research was supported by the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute, Brown Community Health Scholarship Program, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Special Interest Projects. Received: FebruAccepted: Published: May 14, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Mui et al. PLoS ONE 14(5):Įditor: Kenzie Latham-Mintus, Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis, UNITED STATES Findings shed light on a new framework for thinking about barriers related to healthy food access and pointed to potential new avenues for intervention, such as reducing neighborhood crime.Ĭitation: Mui Y, Ballard E, Lopatin E, Thornton RLJ, Pollack Porter KM, Gittelsohn J (2019) A community-based system dynamics approach suggests solutions for improving healthy food access in a low-income urban environment. Crime played a prominent role in several feedback loops within the neighborhood food system: contributing to healthy food being “risky food,” supporting unhealthy food stores, and severing social ties important for learning about healthy food. Synthesis of diagrams yielded 21 factors and their embedded feedback loops. This process culminated in the development of causal loop diagrams, based on participants’ perspectives, illustrating the dynamic factors in an urban neighborhood food system. Eighteen participants completed a series of exercises based on a set of pre-defined scripts through an interactive, iterative group model building process over a two-day community-based workshop. We engaged a diverse group of chain and local food outlet owners, residents, neighborhood organizations, and city agencies based in Baltimore, MD. Little is known about the mechanisms through which neighborhood-level factors (e.g., social support, economic opportunity) relate to suboptimal availability of healthy foods in low-income urban communities. ![]()
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