Where a woman lives can shape her health during pregnancy as much as her own medical history, our new study suggests.

We looked at more than 163,000 pregnancies across Melbourne and found living in a neighbourhood dominated by fast-food outlets and with few healthy food options was strongly linked to indicators of poorer health for both mother and baby.

This included the mother being overweight going into pregnancy or having gestational diabetes, and babies born much larger than average.

These not only affect women and babies around the time of pregnancy, they increase the risk of poorer health later in life.

So we need to start thinking about urban planning and access to healthy food as core public health issues that have direct impacts on health.

We looked at records of single births from 2020 to 2023 across Melbourne. We then linked those records to local data about neighbourhoods. Data included the density of fast-food outlets and supermarkets, walkability and liveability.

We then accounted for factors that might explain differences in the health of pregnant women and their babies. These included a woman’s age, number of previous pregnancies, whether she smoked while pregnant, and her socioeconomic status.

Our clearest finding was that areas saturated with fast-food outlets increased women’s likelihood of entering pregnancy overweight........

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