Whether you are planning meals for home or work or trying to make lifestyle choices to reduce the risk of chronic disease, these healthy eating resources can help you feel your best. It helps you choose foods that improve your health and meet your nutrient needs. These choices can help reduce your risk of nutrition-related chronic diseases and conditions.
Health Canada is currently reviewing whether further guidance is needed for health professionals and policy makers on amounts and types of food for specific populations and settings. As such the best strategies to improve food access do not assess and target food access issues in isolation, but rather assess community dynamics, build on community strengths, and empower communities.
Maintaining a strong emphasis on the community context throughout the implementation of policies and programs creates an impetus for residents to redefine their sense of community to include access to healthy food.
While the depth and breadth of local knowledge may vary by type of government, the locality, and the policies being considered, improving access to healthy food necessitates an understanding of local dynamics. For example, the key to finding a successful solution may originate in understanding how and why access to healthy food became problematic in the community.
This may involve understanding the history of the community from development to population growth to business policies. To understand the best way to implement potential solutions, it is crucial to identify which organizations, such as nonprofits, community centers, and faith institutions, have strong ties to the community.
Likewise, when building connections between residents and local sources of healthy food, it is important to know what sources of healthy food are locally available. The figure to the right illustrates key local sources of healthy food that should be considered when assessing the status of healthy food access and when designing policies to improve access.
Fast food restaurants and convenience stores are found in greater numbers in low-income communities than grocery stores with healthy food options. Without reliable transportation, residents are limited to local food retailers.
To address health food proximity, residents need to be connected with local sources of healthy food. Residents also need access to food pantries. A report by the USDA showed that 28 percent of food insecure households use food pantries. For low-income individuals, these pantries provide essential services, so it is important to make sure those who need to use food pantries can access them. Thus, it is important to ensure that food pantries are both present in communities and located along connected transportation networks.
Additionally, rural communities often do not have the population density to sustain grocery stores within walking distance of all residents. Several strategies, including improved access to transportation for rural residents and rotating public markets among several locations across town, can help address these food access issues in rural communities.
Healthy food choices are more expensive than unhealthy food. Large chain supermarkets offer lower prices than convenience stores. When the price of a food, healthy or unhealthy, is decreased, more people will buy that food. If unhealthy foods are frequently being sold at much lower prices than healthy foods, studies have shown that people are more likely to buy the unhealthy foods.
These forms of payment require special technology to process them. Increasing the proportion of food retail locations that accept SNAP and WIC benefits is an important component of making healthy food more affordable. Across Delaware, many programs are addressing both the affordability and proximity of healthy foods.
A major theme in several successful programs is the emphasis on buying and producing locally. The graphic below shows the many categories of local buying options Delaware has cataloged in its Buy Local Guide to help improve awareness for opportunities to buy locally grown produce in nearby communities.
Credit: Complete Communities. Accessing healthy food involves knowing there is a nearby location that offers healthy food, traveling to that location, and purchasing the healthy food. Transportation barriers break the connection between knowing that healthy food retailers exist and actually purchasing the food.
Safe, accessible transportation plays a key role in linking people to healthy food. Over the course of several decades, transportation infrastructure in Delaware and across the country has emphasized automobile travel with little regard to other forms of transportation. For those without cars, forms of active transportation like walking and biking are essential forms of travel. To ensure access to healthy food for people of all ages, abilities, and incomes, communities need to establish accessible and connected pedestrian and bicycling networks that link to sources of healthy food.
Communities can improve the viability of active transportation by focusing on two areas: healthy food proximity and activity-supportive built environments. Cars allow people to quickly travel long distances with ease during all seasons, but without access to a vehicle, it is difficult to regularly travel long distances.
In cities and other densely populated areas, many residents do not have regular access to a car. When healthy food retailers are located beyond this distance, the amount of time required to travel to and from the store can be challenging for people who are often managing busy jobs, families, and more.
Additionally, it is difficult to carry any significant amount of groceries over a long distance, so people would have to travel the lengthy, time-consuming distance to the grocery outlet more often than if it were located nearby. Active transportation is any human-powered mode of transportation such as walking or bicycling.
Activity-supportive built environments not only increase physical activity, but also promote transportation equity for people who do not drive or own cars. Planning for activity- supportive infrastructure goes beyond the simple existence of sidewalks and bike lanes.
For activity transportation to be a viable option, activity-supportive infrastructure must be designed with key origins and destinations in mind. To provide more equitable access to healthy food, these features form continuous, safe linkages from where people live to sources of healthy food.
For more information on planning for activity-friendly environments, see the Walkability , Bikeability , and Complete Streets sections of the Delaware Complete Communities Planning Toolbox. Public transit can connect people living in densely populated areas with large-scale supermarkets, which are often located outside of urban areas.
However, the Federal Highway Administration estimates that people are only willing to walk one-quarter to one-half mile to get to mass transit, so if stops are beyond this point, residents are unlikely to view mass transit as a practical form of transportation.
With careful planning and modification, public transit can provide practical and accessible connections to healthy food retailers. For those who live in rural areas and do not own vehicles, distance and a lack of active transportation infrastructure sidewalks, bike lanes, crosswalks, etc. Credit: James Pernol. While vehicle ownership rates are higher among rural residents than urban residents, there are many residents who lack regular access to a vehicle. Additionally, for multi-member households with only one car, it can be difficult to make long trips to the grocery store when other household members may need the car to travel to work, child-care locations, or any other number of competing uses.
Since supermarkets are farther away in rural areas than they are in urban or suburban areas, supermarket trips require more travel time than elsewhere. While 12 percent of the population faces food insecurity, 16 percent of seniors are food insecure. With a higher proportion of adults over 65 than the national average, Delaware needs to ensure that its seniors have access to healthy, nutritious food. In addition to facing the same challenges all community members face when accessing healthy food, seniors tend to face additional obstacles due to limited mobility and reduced income.
As is the case for the population as a whole, the ability to travel to healthy food retailers plays a key role in access to healthy food among seniors. In addition to the transportation barriers faced by all members of the community, seniors tend to encounter many mobility barriers at higher rates than the rest of the population. These challenges include:. Affording healthy food can be challenging for seniors who often have a reduced income.
In addition to working with local food programs, communities can make healthy food more affordable for seniors by connecting seniors with and supporting existing programs on the state and federal level that provide nutrition assistance to seniors. These programs include:.
Though many seniors qualify for SNAP benefits, only 42 percent of eligible seniors sign up for and receive these benefits.
Considering that 83 percent of eligible residents of all ages participate in SNAP, the participation rate among seniors is unusually low. Many national groups , states, and community organizations have researched the reasons behind low senior enrollment in SNAP, and they have identified several barriers including stigma, misinformation, lack of awareness, lack of transportation to required interview, and the lengthy, detail- intensive nature of the application. Some examples of ESAP procedures include shorter applications, reduced re-enrollment requirements, and permission for telephone interviews rather than in-person interviews.
As of July , Delaware does not have an ESAP program in place, but communities and organizations can help address challenges associated with SNAP applications by directly assisting their seniors.
The Food Bank of Delaware provides application assistance to any interested parties, so communities can connect seniors with the Food Bank. Through these efforts, communities can improve SNAP enrollment and reduce food insecurity among local seniors. On the other hand, farm stands operate more consistently throughout the week and usually have only one vendor, though the produce may have been obtained from any number of farmers.
CSAs are programs that create a relationship between local farmers and residents by allowing community members to buy shares of produce at the beginning of the season in return for regularly supplied boxes of mixed produce from the local farm.
Some CSAs also allow consumers to help farmers in other ways e. By bringing community members and local farmers together, CSA programs benefit farmers and consumers alike. In contrast to visiting shops and markets, once a person buys into a CSA they are guaranteed a certain number of produce boxes throughout the growing season.
There are many benefits to promoting and providing residents with greener places to live. Lack of access is one reason why many children are not eating recommended levels of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Food insecurity and hunger among children is widespread. A recent USDA report showed that in , an estimated 49 million people, including 17 million children, lived in households that experienced hunger multiple times throughout the year.
In our effort to fight obesity in children and adolescents, it is important that we focus on increasing access to healthy and affordable foods.
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