LOS ANGELES — City officials are putting South Los Angeles on a diet.
The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to place a moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in an impoverished swath of the city with a proliferation of such eateries and above average rates of obesity.
The yearlong moratorium is intended to give the city time to attract restaurants that serve healthier food. The action, which the mayor must still sign into law, is believed to be the first of its kind by a major city to protect public health.
A report by the Community Health Councils found 73 percent of South Los Angeles restaurants were fast food, compared with 42 percent in West Los Angeles.
Thirty percent of adults in South Los Angeles area are obese, compared with 19.1 percent for the metropolitan area and 14.1 percent for the affluent Westside, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
The California Restaurant Association and its members will consider a legal challenge to the ordinance, spokesman Andrew Casana said.
South Los Angeles resident Curtis English acknowledged that fast food is loaded with calories and cholesterol. But since he’s unemployed and does not have a car, it serves as a cheap, convenient staple for him.
On Monday, he ate breakfast and lunch — a sausage burrito and double cheeseburger, respectively — at a McDonald’s a few blocks from home for just $2.39.
“I don’t think there’s too many fast-food places,” he said. “People like it.”
Others welcomed an opportunity to get different kinds of food into their neighborhood.
“They should open more healthy places,” Dorothy Meighan said outside a KFC outlet. “There’s too much fried stuff.”
The moratorium, which can be extended up to a year, only affects standalone restaurants, not eateries located in malls or strip shopping centers. It defines fast-food restaurants as those that do not offer table service and provide a limited menu of prepared or quickly heated food in disposable wrapping.
The definition exempts “fast-food casual” restaurants such as Subway, which does not have a drive-through window or heat lamps and prepares fresh food to order.
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