An easy way to eat healthier this summer: Find a farmers’ market

June 23 is circled on a lot of calendars at Harvard Medical School. It’s the day the Mission Hill Farmers’ Market will open for the summer, just a couple of blocks from the campus. For the last several years we’ve looked forward to the arrival of the trucks laden with leafy greens, succulent fruit, and fresh flowers. Like the residents of the Mission Hill neighborhood, we know how fortunate we are to have the market. April Bowling, a doctoral student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, sums up the benefits we’re getting: “When you attend a farmers’ market, you can have exposure to all kinds of fruits and vegetables that you may not see in your local grocery store. You may try things that you would not normally eat.” Bowling and her colleagues have studied the effects of farmers’ markets on residents of inner city neighborhoods similar to Mission Hill. In an article published online by Health Promotion Perspectives, they reported the results of a study conducted with Farm Fresh Rhode Island — a food system that supports 11 farmers’ markets in cities across the state. Farm Fresh Rhode Island enrolled 425 families in a program to see whether providing a financial incentive — $20 to spend at a farmers’ market at every third visit to the market — would encourage them to shop at the markets more frequently and to consume more healthful foods. The research team surveyed a representative sample of 146 people when they entered the program early in t...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Behavioral Health Healthy Eating Source Type: news