The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, in collaboration with the Reuben V. Anderson Institute for Social Justice at Tougaloo College, Delta Health Center, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), is working toward the development of community-based programs to increase local production and consumption of fruits and vegetables in the Mississippi Delta. A $6.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding the initiative.
The effort, if successful, will simultaneously lower risk factors that result in the region having some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the U.S.—and ultimately save billions in health-care costs.
Attorney Julian Miller, the director of Tougaloo College’s Reuben V. Anderson Institute for Social Justice and an assistant professor of political science, is a co-principal investigator on the project, working closely with Christina Economos, dean at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and the New Balance Chair in Childhood Nutrition, among other partners.
Miller helps oversee the project in three Mississippi counties where over 65% of the 100,000 residents identify as Black or African American and about 30% live at or below the poverty level. More than 50% of women and 40% of men living in these counties have obesity, and the rate of diabetes is almost double the national average.
To his work on this project, Miller brings the experience of his service on the Mississippi Food Policy Council, which helps lay the foundation for the development of a sustainable, equitable statewide food system based on worker-owned cooperative farms.
This NIH-funded project is an outgrowth of the Food is Medicine (FIM) intervention, which recognizes the link between nutrition and chronic diseases. FIM programs include components like health clinic mobile food markets, patient prescriptions for obtaining healthier food, and produce-delivery mechanisms that make fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods easier to access for those in food deserts.
To study the effectiveness of the Food is Medicine movement, in this project, a group of 150 individuals will be enrolled in the community-based program over a 12-month period. They and a control group of 150 individuals who do not have access to the intervention will have assessments of their body mass index (an indicator of obesity), hemoglobin A1c (a measure of diabetes risk and control), dietary intake, and other measures taken at regular intervals.
“This is a major effort to both build local food economies and integrate nutrition into the healthcare system and federal social safety net programs such as SNAP and Medicare/Medicaid,” said Miller. “We hope to identify effective, scalable ways to use food to ease disparities, lower rates of diseases such as diabetes and heart disease and save billions of dollars annually in health-care costs.”