No decline in child obesity in US, despite efforts: study

[haele]

40. I lived in a neighborhood with one grocery store and five corner stores/bodegas in a 5 mile radius.

The one grocery store - an IGA - was a medium-sized store about eight aisles; one entire section dedicated to frozen and an old-school 14 ft. unused butcher section and chill case area along the back and only one aisle of fruit and veggies that were pretty much always close to over-ripe. Which is good when you want to eat and cook with them quickly, but not when you can only get out and shop once a week.
The corner stores - about 800 sq. ft. - do have about 8 to 10 ft. of fresh produce area which ended up leaving shoppers with a choice of maybe a dozen bins of various fruits and veggies that were pretty much cleared out if you got there after 1pm. Only two of the bodegas provide a halfway decent selection of fresh meat, dairy, eggs or a decent selection of canned or dry veggies and grains where someone could actually make healthy meals for their families on a regular basis - so long as the stores don't sell out of what's on the menu that day or week.
And there were lots of non-drivers and people on limited in that neighborhood.
That's not even considering the food desert areas, where all they have available within walking or public transportation distance are neighborhood corner stores or gas station/convenience store mini-marts. If there's more than a couple bags of fresh fruit, more than four boxes of rice and two cartons of eggs available to shoppers in those places every day, they're lucky. This is not like the old days; when I was growing up, the corner grocery store was a grocery store rather than a corner liquor-and-junk-food store that provided high-priced groceries for emergency shopping - there was always a fresh meat and dairy area, and at least a half aisle of fairly fresh fruit and veggies that, while generally sourced locally, had enough variety where there was something for everyone.

You're pretty lucky to live in an area where every grocery store has a good fruit and vegetable section.

Haele