The Foods In Local Corner Stores
The leading cause of diabetes and heart disease is an unhealthy diet. For many years people have tried to lose weight by changing their dieting habits. To properly lose weight and achieve that desired number on the scale it takes more than a change in your daily diet. Many stores in the United States sell foods that make it ultimately challenging to live a “healthy” lifestyle. Studies have been recorded to show what an inadequate diet can do to your physical health as well. Articles by Michael Pollan and Olga Khazan connect common diseases to diet trends and convenience store food policies.
Rate of Diabetes
According to the CDC 79,535 people die per year due to diabetes. While a person can be diagnosed with diabetes for many reasons, most of the cases are due to a person’s unhealthy food history. When a person is diagnosed with diabetes it increases a person’s chances of having a stroke or even a heart attack. When eating poorly you can cause kidney failure in your body. According to the American Heart Association “adults with diabetes are up to 2–4 times more likely to have cardiovascular disease than people without diabetes”. With diabetes being the leading cause of deaths in the U.S. people have been trying to come up with ways to prevent the issue.
Making a Change
While most of the people in the world do not fully understand what their food habits are doing to them, some other do. A company called the D.C. Central Kitchen is trying to fix the issue spoken about previously. This non-profit organization provides organic fruits and vegetables along with a refrigerator to small corner stores (convenience stores). Their reason for doing this is to allow companies who may not be able to afford the fresh and healthy foods to be able to sell it to their community. The D.C. Central Kitchen understands that fresh fruits and vegetables are the cheapest item on a store owners grocery list of their store. The organization provided the foods and a refrigerator to a small store in Northeast Washington called Thomas & Sons. At this store, your typical junk food is the star of the show while healthy options are not. With the help of D.C. Central Kitchen this store has some new fruits and vegetables to offer. After the new items made the shelves the store owner immediately saw a change in his customers. Kids from down the block would get bored at home at run down to buy an apple. Parents loved it, and kids loved it. This ultimately helped reduce the unhealthy food issue in this store. And as of today, the D.C. Central Kitchen is still trying to help hundreds of small stores all over the world.
Cannot Always Be That Easy
So, some might wonder if the D.C. Central Kitchen makes it so easy to change the problem then why is there not more change all around us every day in all the stores we go to. Well, Melissa Laska wrote an article called “Agreements between Small Food Store Retailers and Their Suppliers: Incentivizing Unhealthy Foods and Beverages in Four Urban Settings.”. In this article she explains why small store owners simply can not afford to buy healthier foods over the junk food. She holds an interview with small business owners and learns that the big-name brand junk food distributers offer heavy incentives to get business owners to buy their product. Meaning, the big-name brand foods such as Hershey, Little Debbie, Hostess Brand, PepsiCo, Red Bull, and many more offer owners’ “gifts” for buying their products. Some of the incentives are “product displays, free/discounted products, marketing materials, and slotting payments/fees”. By doing this it makes it almost impossible for a store owner to say no to a company’s offer to buy their products. Healthy food companies can not offer these incentives as easily due to their product being more expensive. If they were to offer incentives as much as these other companies then they would not be able to make profit themselves. Laska asked the small business owners she interviewed how many stores were able to sell fresh fruits and vegetables, the owners stated that only 21% of stores in her study sold fresh fruits and vegetables while 85% sold sweet snack. This showing that the unhealthy foods do rule the food industry when it comes to smaller stores.
Community Affects
In an article by Wenjun Li, he shows how a community’s race can affect people’s buying and eating habits in stores and at home. In his article he states that “Racial differences in diet quality may contribute to health disparities in older age, but successful promotion of healthy eating among older blacks may help reduce disparities in nutrition-related health outcomes…”. . Li ended up doing an experiment which consisted up watching to see how what black and white people buy differs. In this time, he learned that “Substantial racial disparities emerged although findings were mixed: Blacks averaged a significantly lower diet quality than whites, including lower consumption of vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes, and cereal fiber. Whites averaged significantly more daily calories, fiber, calcium, and potassium, but consumed more caffeine and alcohol. Blacks shopped less frequently, traveled for a longer time from home to their usual food store, and ate out at restaurants somewhat less frequently than whites.”. While the black community had a lower number of healthy foods. The American Diabetes Association also states that “4.9 million African-American adults, or 18.7% of all African Americans ≥ 20 years of age, have diagnosed or undiagnosed diabetes, compared to 7.1% of non-Hispanic white Americans”. If you tend to lack fruits and vegetables and healthy vitamins in your diet, then the risk of diabetes is increased. For the minority group of people if they have less money, they may not be able to afford to buy the healthier foods, or even be able to drive to a store that sells them. When people argue it may not always be a person’s fault, they always choose the unhealthy foods that are close to home, they are correct.
Dieting Habits
Michael Pollan writes about the “Western Diet” in his articles called “Escaping the Western Diet”. In this article Pollan explains the western diet is the diet that people have been fallowing for centuries now, lots of meats and carbohydrates with minimal fruits and vegetables. On the other hand, Helmut Schroder writes about the Mediterranean diet. In 2007 Helmut Schroder write the article “Protective Mechanisms of the Mediterranean diet in Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes”. The Mediterranean diet is a diet based off the eating habits of Spain, Italy, and Greece in the 1960’s. unlike the Western diet the Mediterranean diet is based on fresh fruits and vegetables and olive oil as a source of fat. This article explains how the Mediterranean diet offers useful mechanisms to protect people from diabetes and obesity. People who partake in the Mediterranean diet have a high intake of legumes, fruits, vegetables, cereals, olive oil, and fish. While having a low intake of meat and dairy products. When all these components are well balanced a healthy weight is achievable. Thinking back to the corner stores that do not sell much of these high intake foods typically seen throughout the Mediterranean diet. If you rarely visit the grocery store and rely on quick foods, then your body can not process the fats and oils you consume. If more people believed in the Mediterranean diet and more stores sold food to fit it then the rate of diabetes and obesity as well as heart disease would decrease.
