Addressing Rural Health Disparities Through Policy Change in the Stroke Belt (2013)

Undergraduates: Sarah Drobka, Yes, Addressing Rural Health Disparities Through Policy Change in the Stroke Belt

Faculty Advisor: Alice Ammerman
Department: Nutrition

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Heart Healthy Lenoir (HHL) Project is a community- based, participatory initiative that is a joint effort of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, East Carolina University, and a broad coalition of local community partners. The objective of HHL is to create long-term, sustainable approaches to reduce cardiovascular disease risk and disparities in risk in Lenoir County, North Carolina. The study described here was a part of formative research for development of sustainable, community level approaches to reduce cardiovascular disease risk as part of the HHL project.
To guide local jurisdictions in making policy and environmental changes to prevent obesity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the ¿Common Community Measures for Obesity Prevention¿ (CO- COMO), a set of 24 recommended community-level obesity-prevention strategies. For example, COCOMO strategy 6 is ¿Communities should provide incentives for the production, distribution, and procurement of foods from local farms¿. While there are a variety of obesity-prevention policy and environmental change strategies suggested, little is known about how feasible and acceptable such strategies are in the rural, southern United States. Local policy makers and stakeholders in rural eastern North Carolina were surveyed and interviewed to determine winnable obesity-prevention policies, from among the COCOMO-recommended strategies.