{"id":65965,"date":"2012-09-21T08:14:20","date_gmt":"2012-09-21T12:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=65965"},"modified":"2012-10-04T09:35:46","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T13:35:46","slug":"you-are-what-you-eat-and-where-you-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/09\/you-are-what-you-eat-and-where-you-live\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are What You Eat \u2013 And Where You Live"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Debarchana<\/a>
Debarchana Ghosh wants to know how proximity to services, such as grocery stores and medical centers, affects people’s health. (Christine Buckley\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In her medical and health geography class last spring, assistant professor Debarchana (Debs) Ghosh asked her students to do something a bit odd: to look for terrible food.<\/p>\n

\u201cI asked them to go to their neighborhood and find the highest-calorie food they could for just one dollar or less,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The students expected to come back with tales of sugary processed foods. \u00a0But what astounded them was the sheer size of food they could acquire for a mere buck.<\/p>\n

The winner was a pre-wrapped package of sixteen pieces of pie for 96 cents, containing 6,880 calories.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes a point,\u201d says Ghosh. \u201cIf someone is struggling with money and has to feed their family, that\u2019s what they\u2019re going to choose: the cheap, calorie-rich foods in their neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghosh\u2019s research centers around just this fact. From the availability of fresh foods to poor people in Hartford, to the accessibility of drugs to HIV sufferers in India, Ghosh wants to know how where people live affects their daily health choices.<\/p>\n

Lost in the desert<\/strong><\/p>\n

Food deserts, or regions where access to healthy food is scarce, are common in poor sections of cities. When the nearest produce is sold in a grocery store even as little as a mile away, city residents often don\u2019t have the time or the resources to get there.<\/p>\n

In many cases, there\u2019s also a compounding factor of the relative availability of unhealthy foods. If the supermarket is a mile away but there\u2019s a McDonald\u2019s around the corner, which will people choose more often? Ghosh says the answer is clear.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a double-edged sword,\u201d she says. \u201cIf your closest choice is bad foods, that might mean you choose that more frequently.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghosh, who joined UConn last fall, wants to add the availability of unhealthy foods to the definition of a food desert. She was recently awarded a grant from the CLAS Bennett Fund for Innovative Education in Health and Society, which supports programs and undergraduate education addressing the social aspects of human health.<\/p>\n

With the funding, she will teach a hands-on course that helps students better understand people\u2019s lives in food deserts. Undergraduates will go into communities in Hartford, East Hartford, and West Hartford, and guide local teachers, community leaders, and parents to document the foods people around them eat through photography.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to collect data from their point of view, within each neighborhood,\u201d explains Ghosh.<\/p>\n

Students will also analyze food receipts from community members over the course of six months, to understand what people are eating, where they are buying it, and how often they go grocery shopping.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere we live has an effect on the choices we make,\u201d Ghosh says. \u201cYou need a significant behavioral intervention to convince someone to go two neighborhoods away to get fresh food groceries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Social stigmas <\/strong><\/p>\n

Across the globe, Ghosh\u2019s research takes on another geographical problem: access to health care. In West Bengal, India, people who are HIV-positive or have the AIDS virus vary greatly in their proximity to clinics that provide the antiretroviral drug that can slow the disease\u2019s progress. If there are two or three clinics in a district \u2013 similar in size to a U.S. Census tract, she says \u2013 how does that relate to the number of people close by who actually have the disease?<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a layer of stigma that goes with having the disease and traveling to one of these centers,\u201d Ghosh says. If access to the centers is convenient and discreet, people are more likely to actually pick up and take their medicine.<\/p>\n

This summer, Ghosh was awarded a UConn Faculty Large Grant to travel to West Bengal. There she spoke with members of high-risk communities, including a brothel. Many female sex workers said they wouldn\u2019t want to get tested for HIV because there aren\u2019t testing centers in their area \u2013 and anyway, if they found out they did have HIV, they\u2019d be out of a job.<\/p>\n

\u201cTesting has been a big challenge,\u201d says Ghosh. \u201cThe Indian government is trying to spread the benefits of testing and remove the stigma of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghosh\u2019s work in India will involve combining traditional geographic mapping and analyses with the use of surveys and questionnaires to understand the behavior of at-risk populations.<\/p>\n

That combination, says Ghosh, is something she loves about her work.<\/p>\n

You can do that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ghosh has always liked \u201casking spatial questions,\u201d as she puts it. After her undergraduate and master\u2019s studies in Calcutta and New Delhi, India, she earned her Ph.D. studying the medical geography of the West Nile virus at the University of Minnesota.<\/p>\n

But, she says, \u201cYou don\u2019t build things in a vacuum.\u201d The public, social side of geography is also crucial, she says, to improving health policy. So combining the two seems the natural way for her to approach her research.<\/p>\n

It also tends to surprise some people, especially those who think the study of geography is simply learning the capitals of the world\u2019s countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes me happy when I hear people say, \u2018You can do that in geography? I didn\u2019t know you could do that in GIS!\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cI tell them, yes, you can.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Geography faculty member Debarchana Ghosh studies how proximity to services, such as grocery stores and medical centers, affects people\u2019s health. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":64610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2076,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[63],"class_list":["post-65965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-04 10:49:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65965"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65968,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65965\/revisions\/65968"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/64610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65965"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=65965"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=65965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}