SOUTH BRONX — A health plan in Morrisania and Concourse aims to tackle the borough's obesity epidemic one bodega at a time.
Montefiore's Office of Community and Population Health recently started implementing the Shop Healthy NYC program in the neighborhoods, a plan centered on encouraging local bodegas to start stocking and selling healthier food.
The office has specifically identified a group of eight bodegas to target in the section of Morrisania bordered by East 163rd Street, Third Avenue, East 167th Street, Park Avenue and Brook Avenue and a group of five bodegas to target in the section of Concourse bordered by McClellan Street, Walton Avenue, East 165th Street and Gerard Avenue.
A section of Morrisania contains 485 obese Montefiore patients, making up nearly a quarter of that area's total population. While a section of Concourse contains 401 obese Montefiore patients, or about 22 percent of the total population there, according to the health care company.
Officials would like the shops to focus more on selling low calorie beverages like seltzer water and one percent milk, canned fruits and vegetables, and low-sodium snacks like baked potato chips and unsalted nuts.
"If you can figure out how to do it at a block group level, you could actually really be changing the food environment," said Dr. Amanda Parsons, vice president of community and population health at Montefiore, "which we know is important for changing what obesity and diabetes look like."
Although Montefiore plans to help encourage these bodegas to sell healthier options by setting up a training program for workers that will teach them about health food, Parsons stressed that the ultimate success of the plan would be largely determined by whether or not neighborhood residents want these healthier choices.
"They’re not going to stock what isn’t going to sell," she said, "and so in order for them to stock healthier foods, both at the bodega level and the distributor level, they need to see a demand."
Officials have thus already started calling on community members to support the initiative by encouraging bodegas to stock healthier foods themselves and buying the healthy products as they become available. Montefiore also plans on partnering with schools to talk with students about making healthier food choices.
John Dudley, district manager of Bronx Community Board 3, said that he would buy more health food if it was available in his neighborhood, but he was unsure about whether or not there was a strong demand for this in his district.
He pointed to education about health as the best way to make sure people in the neighborhood will support the Shop Healthy initiative with their wallets.
"People say education is important," he said, "but they don’t realize how important education really is in terms of being able to change behavioral patterns and decisions that people make in general, particularly in the area of nutrition."
One of the shops Montefiore plans on targeting is the bodega at 3240 Third Ave., where manager Ali Alsidi said he had previously tried selling fresh produce.
However, this attempt was not very successful, as people were able to get the items for less money at a nearby supermarket, forcing him to throw out a lot of the healthier foods he was buying.
"If you get a case, you sell 75, and 25, you drop them," he said. "You lose money."
However, he said he was still interested in trying to sell more health food at the store and would like to put a fruit cart out in front if he can find someone to man it.
The Shop Healthy program has been working to improve food in The Bronx since 2012, according to Montefiore.
The company is working with the Health Department on the initiative, and the agency has previously found success with it by encouraging bodega workers to put water at eye level on shelves and having the stores emphasize products like fruit and water instead of chips and soda, according to Dr. Jane Bedell, Assistant Commissioner for the Bronx District Public Health Office.
In the end, Dudley said, Shop Healthy's success in Morrisania would all come back to supply and demand.
"It’s a business," he said. "Like any business, if it sells, they’ll put it on the shelf. But it’s got to sell."
