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Food Desert Communities Essay

640 Words3 Pages

Populations Affected
Increasing the access to healthy food in low-income, food desert communities is a healthy step toward reducing the rate of chronic disease in our community. Many of the public health challenges and rising health care costs are directly related to chronic diseases and conditions like cardiovascular disease, hypertension, cancer, diabetes, low birth weight, obesity and anemia. Bad nutrition and poor food access plays a role in creating these diseases. This problem affects all age ranges and different demographic areas.

Demographics Of Colorado’s 64 counties, 24 are designated as rural, 23 are designated as frontier (fewer than six people per square mile), and 17 are designated as urban (The Colorado Health Foundation, …show more content…

School programs, Employer programs, and College programs could help to inform residents of ways to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Employer programs that provide employees health insurance would see a reduction of health insurance costs from reduced healthcare cost. Employee programs could offer employee incentives to get healthy and achieve goals. College programs and local school programs could do more to provide education on how to live a healthy lifestyle and the effects that unhealthy diets are having in the United States. A major community change in healthy eating would have a major effect on the cost of healthcare, insurance premiums, and life expectancy. One of the hardest challenges is to help individuals that do not want to change or lower income individuals that do not have access to healthier options. “Regionally across the United States, food insecurity has been found to be the greatest at 14.9 percent in the rural West.6 Of Colorado’s 64 counties, 24 are designated as rural, 23 are designated as frontier (fewer than six people per square mile), and 17 are designated as urban” (Colorado Department of Public Health, 2005) From my experiences, these types of individuals that do not want to change have to go through a major health event where they are face with the hard facts. My hope would be to create a plan that helps all demographics have access and education to healthy

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