Abdominal obesity is a threat to public health and healthy cities. Densification may reduce abdominal obesity, but current evidence of the relationship between population density and abdominal obesity is not conclusive. The aim of this study was to disentangle the nonlinear association between population density and abdominal obesity. Data came from the 2004-2015 China Health and Nutrition Survey, which included 36,422 adults aged between 18 and 65 years. Generalized additive models (GAMs) were applied to explore how population density was associated with objectively measured waist circumference (WC) and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR), after controlling for other built environmental attributes, socioeconomic characteristics, and regional and year fixed effects. We found that population density had N-shaped associations with both WC and WHtR, and the two turning points were 12,000 and 50,000 people/km2. In particular, population density was positively correlated with abdominal obesity when it was below 12,000 people/km2. Population density was negatively associated with abdominal obesity when it was between 12,000 and 50,000 people/km2. Population density was also positively related to abdominal obesity when it was greater than 50,000 people/km2. Therefore, densification is not always useful to reduce abdominal obesity. Policy-makers need to pay more attention to local density contexts before adopting densification strategies.
Keywords: healthy city; neighborhood design; nonlinear effect; obesity; residential density.