Public health experts have begun mapping Australia's so-called 'food deserts' and are finding the consequences for the people who live in them are extremely serious.

The term is used to describe places where there is limited access to shops that sell healthy food, and an abundance of unhealthy takeaway options.

A food desert exists where it is more than 1,600 metres to the nearest grocer, and less than that distance to the nearest takeaway shop.

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Doctor Thomas Astell-Burt from the University of Western Sydney has spent the last year mapping Australia's food deserts.

"A person gets home from a hard day's slog at work or picking up the kids or looking after dependents, then it's easier, and more convenient to go to the fast food retailer or the take away", he said.

The first part of Australia he has mapped is Sydney, and while food deserts are found all over the city, there is a concentration of them in the western suburbs.

Professor Glen Maberly, a diabetes specialist at Blacktown and Mt Druitt Hospitals, said the region's health problems were no coincidence.

"It's about two to three times the chance of having diabetes compared to the seaside suburbs and the inner-city suburbs, and it is related to the food that we eat," he said.

He said the high rate of type 2 diabetes was having flow on effects.

"If you have diabetes, the complications are heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, eye disease. So this is becoming quite prevalent and so our whole health care program is now having to gear up to better manage that," Professor Maberly said.

Dr Astell-Burt said although the problem was entrenched, it was solvable.

"What I think we need to do is work together — meaning the health sector, the planning sector, councillors, anybody who's working in communities — to think about what are the strategies that we can use to provide people with healthier choices," he said.

"For example, Oren Park, which is in south-western Sydney, not too far away from the university I work in.

"[It] has essentially had a Woolworths and other shops available right from the start, so people can choose to move into this neighbourhood and have great access to healthier foods right from the get-go."

Professor Maberly said in western Sydney, the focus had begun to shift to prevention.

"We have a western Sydney diabetes prevention and management initiative which is working with our local health district, and now [that] the primary health care organisations that have come into existence, we've created a prevention alliance," he said.

"We work with the councils, we work with developers, food suppliers and those associated with transport and infrastructure.

"Clearly health isn't those things, but health needs to bring people together, and start to make things change".