Place effects on adult obesity and cardiometabolic health: Evidence from a natural experiment

Despite considerable evidence on clustering of obesity within geographic areas causal estimates of place effects on cardiometabolic health, and their causal pathways, remain rare. This study utilizes a natural experiment based on the quasi-random assignment of military families to different installations to show that adults exposed to places with higher obesity prevalence have a greater likelihood of obesity and other downstream cardiometabolic conditions. We find no evidence to support shared environments as a causal pathway for these place effects, suggesting that alternate pathways such as social influence may be at play. We also provide the first real-world evidence on the effect of exogenous exposure to obesogenic places on theoretically-grounded social influence constructs, such as social norms and social networks. We find evidence of place effects on individuals’ perceptions of descriptive norms and obesogenic composition of social networks, but not on injunctive and subjective norms. The mediating role of social influence in explaining place effects on cardiometabolic health should be examined further in future work.