Eat Right-Live Well! Supermarket Intervention Impact on Sales of Healthy Foods in a Low-Income Neighborhood.

Objective: To evaluate a multifaceted supermarket intervention promoting healthier alternatives to commonly purchased foods.

Design: Sales of 385 foods promoted between July and October, 2012 in the Eat Right-Live Well! intervention supermarket were compared with sales in a control supermarket.

Setting: Two supermarkets in geographically separate, low-income, urban neighborhoods.

Process Evaluation of a Comprehensive Supermarket Intervention in a Low-Income Baltimore Community.

Supermarket-based interventions are one approach to improving the local food environment and reducing obesity and chronic disease in low-income populations. We implemented a multicomponent intervention that aimed to reduce environmental barriers to healthy food purchasing in a supermarket in Southwest Baltimore. The intervention, Eat Right-Live Well! used: shelf labels and in-store displays promoting healthy foods, sales and promotions on healthy foods, in-store taste tests, increasing healthy food products, community outreach events to promote the intervention, and employee training.

Urban community gardeners' knowledge and perceptions of soil contaminant risks.

Although urban community gardening can offer health, social, environmental, and economic benefits, these benefits must be weighed against the potential health risks stemming from exposure to contaminants such as heavy metals and organic chemicals that may be present in urban soils. Individuals who garden at or eat food grown in contaminated urban garden sites may be at risk of exposure to such contaminants. Gardeners may be unaware of these risks and how to manage them.

A framework for understanding grocery purchasing in a low-income urban environment.

Research demonstrates that food desert environments limit low-income shoppers' ability to purchase healthy foods, thereby increasing their likelihood of diet-related illnesses. We sought to understand how individuals in an urban American food desert make grocery-purchasing decisions, and specifically why unhealthy purchases arise. Analysis is based on ethnographic data from participant observation, 37 in-depth interviews, and three focus groups with low-income, primarily African American shoppers with children.

Food Systems and Public Health Disparities.

The United States has set a national goal to eliminate health disparities. This article emphasizes the importance of food systems in generating and exacerbating health disparities in the United States and suggests avenues for reducing them. It presents a conceptual model showing how broad food system conditions interplay with community food environments-and how these relationships are filtered and refracted through prisms of social disparities to generate and exacerbate health disparities.