What is a food desert?

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I, myself, was not familiar with this term until I read an article a few years back.  Very often eating healthfully is framed in a way that requires extreme discipline and self control, putting the onus on the individual. It is framed, simply, to just eat less to lower the amount of calories you are getting. However, there are structural and environmental obstacles to eating and choosing healthy, like access to healthy foods. Food deserts can be described as areas that don’t have enough easily accessible, healthy food options. To get a sense of how common this term is I polled 4 friends at dinner last night to see if they were familiar with this term. As I suspected, only one had heard of this term before.  As I dug a little deeper I found some interesting stuff.

The USDA website has a resources that allows you to find food deserts. There is a map that allows you to enter geographical information to find areas classified as food deserts, based on low access to food and low income.  As I entered a nearby NYC zipcode, I had no idea I would be so close to a zone as 125 and Broadway are extremely busy hubs of activity.  There is was at 126 and Morningside,  a food desert. Just to give some context, this is only a few blocks from Columbia. This goes to show something could be happening right next to you and you don’t even realize it.

Benefits of city living

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Before moving to NYC I was nervous about everything. I was nervous I wouldn’t be able to sleep due to the noise,  that everyone was going to be rude, and that my ankle and back would explode. However, after spending 4 months here, I slowly started to realize all of these concerns never came to fruition.  The constant walking helped me sleep better and to resolve some long term ankle and back pain I’d had. I found some parts of NYC are absurdly quiet at night, given the proximity to major hubs of activity around the city and high concentration of people. Lastly,  I truly relish all  the random acts of kindness I see everyday in NYC that I can’t imagine happening anywhere else. These experiences in NYC were pivotal in developing the foundations of this blog.

Anywho, speaking of the evils of back pain, I quickly found an article that further supported this idea of the importance of walking every day. Give it a click if back health is a really real part of your life.

 

HX behind Urban Health

mmarinade2

Introduction to social determinants of health:

As I christen this blog, I wanted to review the term social determinants of health which is where the idea for this blog sprouted. First, let’s un-jargon this term…social determinants of health means your environment plays a large role and can even dictate your health status. One’s environment includes more obvious elements like your social networks and background, to other less obvious ones like, where you work, or where you play and in which park. All of these factors combine to work towards either promoting your health or act as barriers to a healthful lifestyle. For this blog I hope to review various underrepresented and less talked about issues that go unnoticed. Additionally, 2010 figures reported about 80% of the US lives in  cities. This helped me to further hone in on the issue, as I will focus on urban health.