In West Oakland, California, a neighborhood of 30,000 people populated primarily by African Americans, has one supermarket and thirty- six liquor and convenience stores. Unfortunately, the supermarket is not accessible on foot to most of the area's residents. While the convenience stores are much closer in proximity to the residents, they charge twice as much as grocery stores for identical items. On the flip side, fast food restaurants—selling cheap and food—appear on almost every corner. West Oakland is not unique. The prevalence of fast food in low-income urban neighborhoods across the United States, combined with the lack of access to fresh, healthy food, contributes to an overwhelmingly disproportionate incidence of food-related death and disease among African Americans as compared to whites.
African Americans are more likely to develop hypertension due to lack of exposure of healthier
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For starters, the price gap between actual groceries and fast food is astronomical. When you can buy a burger at a fast food restaurant for a dollar but a salad at the same place cost 7 dollars, the cheaper option—more times than not— appears to be more desirable. In many cases, the financial burden forces them to sacrifice a healthy lifestyle for full bellies. While accessibility to healthier food choices is scarce in many areas, fast food restaurants have managed to appear on just about every corner. The cheapness and accessibility of fast food makes it a go-to in many African American households, they are unaware of what they are really consuming. If black people truly knew what’s in that dollar burger, would they be so quick to purchase it? Through factual evidence, case studies, and statistics I will address the issue of hypertension in the African American communities and find a way to combat