Food Environment Index is Inversely Associated with Gastric Cancer Incidence in the United States.

The first epidemiologic study was conducted to prospectively examine the association between Food Environment Index (FEI) and gastric cancer (GC) risk in the US. Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results provided information on GC incident cases diagnosed between 2000 and 2015 from 16 population-based cancer registries across the US. The county-level food environment was assessed using the FEI, an indicator of access to healthy foods (0 is worst, 10 is best). Poisson regression was used to calculate incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between FEI and GC risk adjusting for individual-level and county-level covariates. Higher levels of FEI were associated with a statistically significant reduced risk for GC (