The Grocery Store Was Never Built for You
by Bill Heiden
Walk into any store, and you'll find chips, donuts, and candy bars everywhere, tempting shoppers with dopamine-inducing flavors.
Our food system is designed to encourage us to behave against our own best interests.
It's no wonder that chronic diseases, many of which are preventable, are on the rise.
The American food system was engineered through subsidies, marketing, and something as calculated as shelf placement to make the unhealthy choice the easy choice. Processed food companies have spent decades and billions of dollars ensuring that the path of least resistance leads straight to the most profitable product on the shelf. The result is a landscape where eating well requires money, time, transportation, and information that millions of Latino families simply do not have in equal measure.
The consequences show up in the body. Diabetes alone makes the point. Hispanics face significantly higher hospitalization and mortality rates from the disease than non-Hispanic whites.* Type 2 diabetes is largely preventable through diet and physical activity. But prevention advice built around a farmer's market and a gym membership means very little to a family living in a food desert, working two jobs, and navigating a healthcare system that does not speak their language.
The food system did not fail Latino communities by accident. It was built around a consumer with more options, more income, and more access. Everyone else was an afterthought. Chronic disease followed. Then the research designed to address it made the same mistake, measuring the problem without ever fully entering the life of the community living it.
For decades, the research that drives healthcare decisions has not looked like the communities it claims to serve. It has measured problems without taking the next step to find solutions. Latino communities bear the cost of that gap every day, in worse outcomes, less effective interventions, and care that was never really designed for them.
That has to change. Generalized research will not fix a specific problem. Organizations like NHHRI are built on that understanding. Cultural sensitivity is not a courtesy, it is a requirement. Prevention pathways and healthcare solutions must be accessible and meaningful to Spanish-speaking populations, not adapted for them at the last minute.
We can always learn more. But the most urgent questions facing Latino community health today are not about what is wrong. Everyone already knows what is wrong. The urgent questions are about what to do, and who gets to be in the room when those answers are being built.
Latino communities cannot afford research that studies them from a distance. The food system was built without them in mind. The solutions cannot be.
*Pardhan, Shahina, Tarnjit Sehmbi, Rumalie Wijewickrama, Hugo Onumajuru, and Mapa Prabhath Piyasena. "Barriers and Facilitators for Engaging Underrepresented Ethnic Minority Populations in Healthcare Research: An Umbrella Review." International Journal for Equity in Health 24 (March 2025): 70. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-025-02431-4
Bill Heiden is a member of the Board of Directors of the Hispanic Health Council, teaches political research at the University of Hartford, and is Executive Director of the anti-poverty organization Levo International.