Grow Your Own Vegetables and Live Longer

More than twenty years ago someone conducted a study that concluded that Mexican Americans were the fattest people in the United States. I don't think we win the prize anymore. I think just about everybody is tied for first place, except those who live in cities where people mostly walk or take public transportation.

If you are a woman and wear a size 18 on up, you have a good chance to develop diabetes or heart trouble when you reach middle age. Why is that? Because obesity has a strong correlation with these diseases. Why do we all wear such big size clothes? Because we eat the wrong things. We don't necessarily eat too much (nix on the people that say fat people are gluttons) - its what we eat....

There is much to say on this subject, but the first thing to think about is eating more fruits and vegetables. What a better way to do this than by making your own community garden?

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January 17, 2010 - New York Times

San Jose Journal

In Latino Gardens, Vegetables, Good Health and Savings Flourish

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

SAN JOSE — At dawn, Maria Lupercio Alarcon wakens to the heady scent of onions and cilantro from her family’s first garden, outside her bedroom window.

The two-month-old vegetable garden, from which Mrs. Alarcon picks extravagant bursts of broccoli for breakfast with scrambled eggs, is both comforting and unfamiliar. It is one of 30 backyard vegetable gardens recently planted by a nonprofit group here called La Mesa Verde, or The Green Table, which makes house calls to help residents of the city’s low-income, predominantly Latino neighborhoods grow their own organic produce.

“People don’t eat vegetables unless they are close by, to be honest with you,” Mrs. Alarcon, a mother of three who grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, said of the human tendency to eat whatever is at hand, especially if it is cheap. “If you have vegetables,” she said, pointing to luxuriant tangles of peas and other delights, “then you can come get them. To see them growing is a blessing.”

The fledgling effort to bring backyard vegetable beds to San Jose neighborhoods like the Washington-Guadalupe and Gardner districts — historic portals for immigrants — is part of a national movement, from West Oakland to Little Rock, Ark., to make healthy food readily accessible to marginalized urban neighborhoods...link to complete article