Growing Support: Localism, Nonprofits, and Food Access in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Problems with food insecurity, such as a lack of access to healthy and affordable food in low-income neighborhoods, has been an ongoing challenge in New Orleans. The damages inflicted by Hurricane Katrina and subsequent citywide flooding on the local food system reduced the numerical count of operational full-service supermarkets and grocery stores throughout the city. The result has been a widespread presence of food deserts and grocery gaps, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. This thesis explores the emergence of food localism practices by food advocacy professionals as a capacity-building tool for New Orleans residents to increase community food security and develop a sustainable local food economy. This paper finds although alternative agro-food networks have increased the availability of healthy and locally produced foods in New Orleans, it provide evidence demonstrating their limited capacity to regularly provide healthy or affordable food in a similar manner to grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods

Acute effects of coffee on QT interval in healthy subjects

The coronary endothelial function is recognized to have an important role in the physiology of the diastolic ventricular relaxation, a phase of the heart cycle that influences the electrocardiographic QT interval. Endothelial function is investigated in vivo by flow mediated dilation (FMD) in the brachial artery and has proven to be a strong predictor of both coronary endothelial function and cardiovascular events. It has been reported that coffee acutely induces FMD changes. In particular, the brachial artery FMD seems to decrease after caffeinated coffee (CC) and to increase after decaffeinated coffee (DC) ingestion. Since the cardiovascular effects of coffee are still a debated matter, this study aimed at investigating with a randomized, double-blind crossover design, if the QT interval of adult healthy subjects (19 males and 21 females) changes in the hour following CC or DC ingestion. Both systolic and diastolic blood pressure were higher in the hour following the ingestion of CC; the heart rate significantly increased 30 minutes after CC ingestion. A significant increase of the QT duration was observed one hour after DC ingestion (398.9 ± 3.8 vs 405.3 ± 3.7 msec; P < 0.05), not after CC. The QT interval corrected for heart rate did not significantly change following CC or DC ingestion. In conclusion, despite CC and DC previously demonstrated to influence the FMD they do not seem to induce a significant unfavourable acute change of the left ventricular repolarization. Further investigations are required to elucidate the effects of coffee in subjects with cardiovascular diseases