12: The Weight of Place – The Role of the Neighbourhood in Childhood Obesity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The neighbourhood environment provides both a social and physical context that is thought to have an effect on behaviours that may influence weight gain. There is limited research in this area on pre-school children. The objective of this study is to examine the association between the built environment and body mass index (BMI) among pre-school-age children while adjusting for known individual level factors associated with pre-school obesity. A cross sectional study of children one to five years of age was conducted using individual level data from the TARGet Kids! cohort in Toronto, Canada which includes prospectively collected data from 3928 children between September 2008 and June 2012. We characterized a child's neighbourhood using a validated neighbourhood walkability index based on 1) car ownership; 2) population per square kilometer of residential area; 3) all services per 10,000 population; 4) average distance from residential points to nearest five retail locations; 5) crime per 100,000).The main outcome was child's zBMI. The mean age of participants at baseline was 33.5 months. The proportion of children included in TARGetKids! with zBMI >1 (overweight) was 20.5% and zBMI >2 (obese) was 4.8%. The outcome, zBMI, was adjusted for: gender, ethnicity, age of child, birth weight, parental BMI, mother's education, free play outdoors, immigration status and neighbourhood level income. The mean zBMI decreased as the walkability of the neighbourhood increased. Compared to the most walkable neighbourhood, the average zBMI of the least walkable was 0.269 vs 0.063 in the most walkable neighbourhood in Toronto. This relationship was maintained after adjustment for individual level factors. Living in a walkable neighbourhood was associated with lower zBMI among preschool-age children after adjustment for individual level factors known to be associated with obesity in young children. Identifying modifiable built environment features that could mitigate the epidemic of childhood obesity could have population wide impact on the health of our children and the adults that they subsequently become.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".