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Healthy Food Is Vital On Our Daily Lives

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Access to healthy food is vital on our daily lives, therefore built environment plays a major role in the accessibility for quality healthy food. A higher density of convenience stores seem to emerge more and more every year. This increase in convenience stores and absence of supermarkets and farmers markets are associated with the rate of obesity increasing among children. The mediating factors between the built environment and accessibility such as sociodemographic characteristics, security and safety, time allocation, and personal and cultural variables. From where families go to access food, to what foods are available to buy in stores, to how informed are the parents about nutrition and healthy cooking, how far families travel in …show more content…

Also, in the absence of grocery stores and other retailers, these communities are missing the commercial vitality needed to make neighborhoods livable and help the local economies thrive. Many of these communities that lack the access to quality healthy food are oversaturated with fast food restaurants, liquor stores, and other sources of inexpensive and neighboring processed food with little to no nutritional value. Studies show that nearly 30 million people in the United States live in low-income areas with limited access to supermarkets (defined as the closest store being more than a mile away). The people or families living in these neighborhoods must make the daily effort to acquire foods available in smaller stores which are unhealthy more expensive, or spend at least twenty minutes traveling to the nearest supermarket or farmer 's market that is nearly twenty miles away. Research suggest that access to healthy food corresponds with a good diet and lower risks of obesity and other various diet related chronic diseases. There is also the benefit of the opportunities of local jobs and help in revitalizing the low income neighborhoods if a new and improved healthy food market or farmer 's market was to be built in these communities.
There is existing evidence that over the course of twenty years they have found this evidence indicating that accessing quality affordable healthy food for many people and families is most

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