University of Minnesota will partner with local communities to address healthy food issues
Contacts:
Becky Beyers, College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, (612) 626-5754
Patty Mattern, University News Service, (612) 624-2801, mattern@umn.edu
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/04/2009) — Two new research projects are bringing together the University of Minnesota with local communities to help the communities ensure their residents eat more healthy, sustainable diets.
The projects, funded by grants from the university’s Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute, involve partnerships between the University of Minnesota and the Little Earth community of Minneapolis, as well as groups in the western Lake Superior region of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The “Little Earth Food Justice and Youth Empowerment Project” is intended to improve the health of young children in Little Earth and the surrounding area by combining education and access to healthy food options, traditional foods and food production opportunities. Researchers will develop and evaluate the success of community-based strategies to address healthy food issues in a manner that is culturally appropriate, sustainable and meaningful to the community. The project investigators are from the Little Earth of United Tribes and the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the university.
The second project, “Defining the Agricultural Landscape of the Western Lake Superior Region,” will involve describing the agricultural landscape of a 14-county region, including its capacity to provide food for its population. Investigators plan to use the data to analyze how a shift to a local foods diet would affect the collective physical and economic health of the region in contrast to a typical American diet. Tribal groups from the area will provide historical background on regional diets as well as information on how standard diets affect the health of residents. The team includes investigators from the University of Minnesota-Duluth as well as local farmers and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Reservation.
“These are very different projects, but they both demonstrate excellent ways in which the university can perform meaningful research with local communities in a truly collaborative manner,” said Mindy Kurzer, director of the Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute.
The Institute fosters interdisciplinary research and outreach from areas as wide-ranging as medicine, agriculture and exercise, through a collaboration of five colleges within the university.
