Supermarkets, lottery, and low birth weight

August 08, 2008

Supermarkets, lottery, and low birth weight

In a study published in Health and Place researchers looked at how access to full service supermarkets might affect low birth weight.

The study looked at access to full service supermarkets and the sale of lottery tickets compared to intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR). The researchers broke this data down into high and low risk areas based on, "an aggregate score for low birth weight, premature births, infant deaths, poverty and other economic indicators." Race and ethnicity did not factor into risk factor.

In their findings the researchers report little difference in "corner stores" in the low and high risk areas.

To determine the volume of lottery ticket sales a Freedom of Information Act request was filed with the New York State Lottery.

We were struck by the lively business in lottery sales; 15 of the 18 corner stores in both the high- and low-risk areas sold lottery tickets. The mean yearly lottery ticket sales per store in the high-risk census was $249,904, compared with $167,501 in the low-risk census tracts. We examined this issue in greater detail and found that the small corner and convenience stores sold 68% of all lottery tickets in the city of Syracuse. [T]he median household income was inversely proportionate to the per capita lottery purchases, and these figures were significantly different between each stratum.

The researchers then looked at access to a full service supermarket and IUGR:

[C]ontrolling for race and Medicaid, the infants of mothers who resided in a non-supermarket census tract were three and one-third times as likely to have full-term unexplained IUGR, compared with infants of mothers living in a supermarket census tract. The second important finding in this analysis is that by including supermarket as a variable, race and Medicaid were no longer statistically significant. Living in proximity to a full service supermarket may thus explain much of the racial and poverty disparities in fetal growth.

And although not statistically significant, when they looked at the sale of lottery tickets and IUGR the researchers found that in the areas where residents spent on average $500 per year on lottery tickets unexplained IUGR was double that of those residents who spent $135 a year on lottery.

Lane et al. Health and Place, Volume 14, issue 3 (September, 2008), p. 415-423

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