Casinos may reduce poverty, obesity in Native American communities
Modest reduction in overweight youth seen after addition of slot machines
By Nathan Seppa
Building a new casino on American Indian tribal land, or expanding an existing one, coincides with higher income and slightly lower rates of being overweight or obese in Native American children living nearby, researchers report in the March 5 JAMA.
Native Americans are more likely to be overweight or obese than their white non-Hispanic counterparts. Those living on tribal lands also face high rates of poverty. To find out whether an injection of legalized gambling affects these problems, researchers used census data to measure income changes in American Indians living near casinos and tapped school health assessments that included body mass measurements of American Indian children before and after casino development.