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Women who eat a lot of fast food may take longer to become pregnant and be more likely to experience infertility than those who rarely eat fast food, Reuters reports.
Women who ate fast food at least four times a week had a 16% risk of infertility and failed to conceive after 12 months of trying, according to a study by the Robinson Research Institute and the University of Adelaide in Australia of 5,598 first-time mothers in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
The risk was only 8% in women who rarely or never ate fast food.
This has big implications for Latinas’ fertility and the food environment.
Latinas and Fertility
“In families of color, there’s an assumption that when you want to get pregnant, you get pregnant,” one woman told the New York Times a few years ago.
But some minority women do deal with infertility.
Infertility is the inability to conceive a child within 12 months of trying.
Latino couples with fertility problems are half as likely as the overall U.S. population to seek infertility treatment, according to a 2014 study.
Also, even the Latina birth rate is in decline, according to Pew Research:
“Throughout much of the early 2000s birth rates of Hispanic women ages 15 to 44 were about 95 births per 1,000 women, reaching a peak of 98.3 in 2006. However, since the onset of the Great Recession, their birth rates have declined, steadily falling to 72.1 births per 1,000 Hispanic women ages 15 to 44 in 2014.”
A big reason could be the food environment, according to the new Australian study.
Latinas and Food Swamps
Many Latinas live in “food swamps.”
Food swamps are areas that include a food desert and a high-density of stores and restaurants that offer high-calorie fast food and junk food, relative to healthier food options.
Food swamps are making people obese.
Child preferences also greatly influenced mothers’ food choice, especially those who wanted to avoid conflicts caused by the child’s preference, according to one study of Latinas and food swamps.
“The neighbourhood food environment could directly influence children’s food preferences and often created conflict between what the child wanted to eat and the foods that mothers valued,” according to the researchers.
Let’s start improving the local food environment!
By The Numbers
1
Supermarket
for every Latino neighborhood, compared to 3 for every non-Latino neighborhood
