U researchers at State Fair want to know about healthy eating

The Minnesota State Fair isn't the likeliest place to gauge interest in healthy eating.

But that's exactly what a team of University of Minnesota researchers is doing.

Jayne Fulkerson, an associate professor at the U, is leading a research effort on healthy eating in rural communities — an attempt to reduce childhood obesity.

Like dozens of other U researchers, her team is using this year's State Fair as a source of study participants.

Over the past several years, Fulkerson's team has studied family meals and children's eating habits in Minneapolis.

Expanding outside of the metro is an unusual idea: Fulkerson said she knows of just one other program in the United States that's doing something similar.

Why is it so uncommon?

In Minneapolis, the team partnered with the Park and Recreation Board to do a pilot study with 44 families, and then a larger one with 160 families.

In kitchens and meeting rooms at park buildings, families participated in monthly workshops for nearly a year.

Now, Fulkerson's team has its sights set on New Ulm, in collaboration with the Heart of New Ulm project.

At the fair, the team is measuring interest in a rural healthy eating program, after a recent grant application to the National Institutes of Health came back with questions about feasibility.

The fair provides a vast pool of people to draw from. Sarah Friend, evaluation director for HOME Plus Study at the U, was set up at a booth Thursday and said she'd heard a lot of interest from people who stopped by.

So things are not always so different from in the cities.