Growing heart healthy food
PECT’s project ‘Growing Healthier Communities’ encouraged residents in Peterborough to enjoy a better quality of life through a more active lifestyle and learning how to cook heart healthy food.
The project was funded thanks to a Heart Research UK and Subway Healthy Heart Grant.
Why did we run this project?
We offered gardening workshops using local communal spaces, teaching people to grow and maintain herbs, salads and vegetables, and cookery skills workshops on how to plan and prepare inexpensive heart-healthy nutritious meals.
Gardening offers all-round exercise for improving strength, endurance and flexibility and can also reduce the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and other medical conditions. This together with cookery skills and nutritional information to encourage people to eat a healthier diet, will help promote heart health.
This project aimed to get people active through gardening and to encourage a healthier, more nutritious diet, changing people’s long-term behaviour. The health benefits of gardening and food growing are well documented. Plus research has shown that adults who participated in community gardening consumed 40% more fruit and vegetables per day than those that did not!
Discover more
This project worked in partnership with Gladstone Connect and Community First.
Our Healthy Heart Gardening Sessions have now finished, but a gardening club still continues at the Allama Iqbal Centre, 157 Cromwell Road, Peterborough PE1 2EL, every Wednesday from 1-3pm. Volunteers are also more than welcome to get involved with the garden. For more information, please see the Gladstone Connect Facebook page.
Project Stats
100%
Would share what they learnt
100%
Would now be more active
30%
Would now grow food at home
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