People-watching in the United States can be a taxing endeavor. Besides the unfavorable ratio of plants to concrete, the neighborhoods I have called home are filled with legions of morbidly obese, diabetic and hypertensive adults and children who struggle daily with their afflictions.

Some are simply short of breath on the jungle gym; others have bigger quarrels with respiration, toting over-the-shoulder oxygen tanks like cumbersome handbags. None of these people are what I would call eyesores. Rather, they are reminders that one's surroundings profoundly shape the body. Taking control of these surroundings is apparently what a city council had in mind when it voted to ban construction of new fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles. Still awaiting the mayor's signature, the moratorium is a response to alarming obesity rates in that part of the city.

Though well intended, the fast food ban is strikingly problematic. In addition to its arbitrariness – free-standing, fast food restaurants are restricted while those in malls and shopping centers are unaffected – the moratorium is born from a faulty equation: that bad food options equal fat communities.

Obesity is a far more complicated issue than this equation implies. Focusing on a lone factor – the number of fast food restaurants – ignores too many other pieces in the puzzle. If we're going to count fast food restaurants, which are reported to comprise three out of every four eating establishments in South Los Angeles, shouldn't we also spend time counting grocery stores, considering their placement and accessibility and even calculating the square footage that each devotes to, say, fresh produce?

Similarly, if we're going to compare obesity rates, reportedly 10 percent higher there than in the rest of the city, isn't it incumbent on policymakers to compare the number of public parks and private gyms, bike paths and community pools? Disparities in neighborhood health neither start nor stop with the number and type of restaurants. They also hinge on the way people shop, cook and exercise and the amenities available for each task.

Pretending these things aren't part of what we now call an obesity epidemic is akin to pointing fingers. And it's much easier to blame food corporations than to reflect on just how, systematically, different parts of the city are set up to be healthier than others.

It's not bad food options, but poor overall resources, that equate to fat neighborhoods. Neighborhoods A and B can sport identical rosters of fast food outlets, but if one has more farmers markets, grocery stores with late hours and parking lots, it's a safe bet that obesity in these two places has a different curve.

But there's something else. The moratorium on fast food restaurants wrongly aids and abets our obsession with this very category of food. On the surface, it's easy to distinguish fast food from other types of food – and, in turn, "bad" food from "good" food. We all know fast food is characterized by bright menu boards, individually packaged condiments and convenient combos.

But somehow the fried chicken sitting in the steam table at the local grocery store falls well outside the category of fast food. So, too, does the fried chicken served at sit-down restaurants, even though it presumably still gets seasoned, battered and submerged in a vat of simmering fat before arriving at the table.

When foods like these escape the categorization of fast food, they also escape the moral indictments levied against the fast food industry for its assumed role in the obesity epidemic.

Certainly there is some truth in the argument that fast-food companies provide unhealthy foods at unprecedented rates and that they disproportionately target poor neighborhoods and people of color. But just like prepared-food cases in grocery stores and menus in sit-down restaurants, fast food franchises offer a range of options. Increasingly these options include alternatives to the deep-fried, heavily sauced and overwhelmingly salted. So should they, alone, be banned?

I can count on one hand the times I've ordered at a drive-through in the last five years. But I still recognize that singularly denouncing fast food restaurants demonizes a category of food establishments while hardly addressing the nutritional implications of individual food choices.

If the moratorium on new, free-standing fast food establishments isn't quickly accompanied by a holistic assessment of obesity's causes and substantial outreach to consumers about their food choices, the City Council will continue peering at body weight in South Los Angeles through an inadequately microscopic lens. It ought to switch its optic to a wide-angle.

Damian Mosley is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University. His e-mail address is damian.mosley@nyu.edu. . Copyright 2008, Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and TheRoot.com. All rights reserved.