Obesity has emerged as a major and growing public health problem in Latin America, and specifically in Brazil. Social and physical environments have been hypothesized to be major determinants of obesity but their contribution to obesity in developing countries has been infrequently examined. This project will establish a collaboration between the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health of the University of Michigan to investigate the role of socioeconomic and neighborhood factors in shaping the distribution of obesity and the related behaviors of diet and physical activity in Belo Horizonte, a large city in Brazil. Using data from a large population-based survey of Belo Horizonte we will (1) examine socioeconomic predictors of obesity, diet, and physical activity (2) test and examine the measurement properties of instruments to measure neighborhood physical and social environments potentially related to cardiovascular risk in the context of a large Latin American;(3) use these instruments to examine associations between neighborhood environments and obesity, diet and physical activity (4) investigate the contribution of these neighborhood factors to the socioeconomic patterning of cardiovascular risk factors in Belo Horizonte. This research will be done primarily at the School of Medicine of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in collaboration with Fernando Proietti and Waleska Caiaffa as an extension of NIH.
Obesity has emerged as major health problem in Latin America. Although social and physical environments (including features of the neighborhoods where people live) have been hypothesized to contribute to obesity these factors remain understudied especially in countries of Latin America. This project will utilize data from a large survey to study the social and neighborhood determinants of obesity in a large city of Brazil.
