BEAUFORT DELTA - More people in Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk may be thinking twice when they go to the grocery store thanks to Healthy Foods North programming. The program shows people how to reduce the fat content in their diets and choose healthier eating options.

People are two-and-a-half times more likely to eat yogurt, four-and-a-half times more likely to choose whole wheat bread and eight times more likely to opt for unsweetened juice in the communities that had the programming, according to Healthy Foods North's lead researcher.

"In the communities where we ran the program, we saw there was a large increase in whole wheat bread, there was an increase in consumption of fruit juices, (and) in traditional food, particularly caribou," Dr. Sangita Sharma said.

Presenting her preliminary findings at a community meeting in Inuvik last week, Sharma said the data is encouraging.

While the future of the project is uncertain, initial research results show people's diets changed since the project started more than a year ago.

Healthy Foods North surveyed residents in two NWT communities and two in Nunavut and compared those results to an NWT community and a Nunavut community where the research program didn't hold any nutrition awareness programming. Researchers asked people about what they ate on a day-to-day basis and then followed up with the same questions one year later.

"We evaluated what people were eating at the beginning, then we ran the program and then we evaluated it with research again at the end," Sharma explained.

From handing out free banana smoothies and blenders in stores to showing shoppers how to cut down on fat intake in a cup of coffee, Healthy Food North interventionists tried to raise awareness about the link between food choices and health. They offered advice on how to prepare more nutritious meals and encouraged retailers to bring in more food, vegetables and low-calorie substitutes into their stores.

In addition to promoting eating traditional foods and more fruit and vegetables, Sharma said the program zeroed in on encouraging people to cut down on the amount of fat and sugar in their diets.

This didn't involve cutting out junk food completely, but Sharma said interventionists tried to encourage people to change their habits, for instance by replacing regular pop with diet pop and using sugar substitutes with coffee.

"We're not saying don't have this. We're staying instead of that, try this, it tastes more or less the same," she said. "It seems small but it has a huge impact."

She said while it may not seem like much, it cuts down on empty calories significantly over the course of a year, especially if people began replacing those calories with nutritious alternatives, like eating an orange or a banana.

But according to the research, the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables people consumed actually dropped.

"It was something we put a lot of time and effort into promoting, but somehow it didn't take," she said of the decrease in fruit and vegetable consumption. "It's not something people traditionally use, it's expensive, it's sometimes difficult to get good quality but ... it still decreases so much more in the non-intervention communities showed that we obviously did something right,"

She said people in the communities where Healthy Foods didn't have any workshops ate eight times fewer fruit and vegetables than the communities that had the program.

In comparison, the results found traditional food consumption went up slightly.

Reflecting on the results, Sharma said, "It was much easier to promote something people are already familiar with."

Sharma, a North Carolina-based researcher, is planning to publish her findings later this year in a public health journal.

She's hoping the results will lead to more funding for the program. As it stands, the handful of Healthy Food North employees are focused on intervention programming in Ulukhaktok, talking to communities about possible initiatives and waiting to see if the program receives funding for new projects.