A project aimed at helping Lehigh Valley residents make healthier choices wants schools, restaurants and grocery stores to be part of the effort.
Blue Zones Project-Allentown seeks to make the Lehigh Valley’s cities healthier places to live by making changes to schools, businesses and neighborhoods that will encourage people to be more active, eat healthier diets high in plants and low in processed foods, and have richer social connections.
The nearly six-year project started in 2023 with a feasibility study, followed by a launch event in July 2024. It’s sponsored by Lehigh Valley Health Network, part of Jefferson Health, as well as City Center Group, Lehigh Valley Phantoms and the Leonard Parker Pool Institute for Health.
Brooke Griffiths, executive director of the Blue Zones Project-Allentown, said from August 2024 through January 2025, members completed the planning phase, hired staff, formed a steering committee, conducted a Gallup Well-Being survey and wrote up a blueprint paper that the project plans to share publicly within the next few months in both English and Spanish. The project held a kickoff event in April in Allentown that was attended by 575 members of the community.
The Well-Being survey, completed in October, found multiple areas where life in Allentown could be better, and will inform the course of the project. Griffiths said 6,550 surveys were mailed out in Allentown; 13.5%, or just under 900, were returned.
The survey found that in every category respondents indicated Allentown was worse than the U.S. as a whole, including for overall well-being, career, social, financial, physical and community. However, the only category that was significantly worse was financial well-being, where Allentown’s score was 49.9 versus the national score of 62. Responses showed a significant ethnic divide: White Allentown residents had a financial well-being score of 60.6, whereas Hispanic and Latino residents had a score of 40.
The survey also found that Allentown residents are generally less proud of their community, less inclined to say where they live is the perfect place and less likely to see the city as a safe place.
Allentown also lagged behind the overall country in general health and specific measures of health. Residents were more likely to say their health was fair or poor than excellent or good. Pain was a problem identified as worse than average by the study, and Allentown residents are also more stressed than Americans as a whole; 1 in 4 reported being treated for depression.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though.
“Neighborliness was found to be good in Allentown, with 35% of adults routinely greeting at least six neighbors. So we have some strengths to build on there,” Griffiths said.
What are Blue Zones and do they work?
Blue Zones are area across the world that are purported to have the healthiest, longest-living populations. These places, such as Sardinia, Italy, and Icaria, Greece, were identified by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow and founder of the Blue Zones organization, and are the subject of a docuseries on Netflix.
The existence of actual Blue Zones, isolated pockets of healthy people living to 100 and beyond, is disputed, with one recent award-winning study suggesting many cases of centenarians and supercentenarians across the globe, including those identified by the organization and docuseries, are due to clerical errors or pension fraud.
In a recent opinion piece published in The Morning Call, Dr. Rajika Reed, St. Luke’s vice president of community health, also questioned the program’s “one-size-fits-all-approach,” saying it ignores the community’s diversity.
“Are we to believe that the residents of our cities want to adopt an extraneous approach to health and longevity?” Reed wrote. “Would we simply trade our ways of life for the practices of, say, Okinawa or Sardinia?”
Reed said St. Luke’s was approached by the Blue Zones organization in 2022 to participate and declined, in part because of the cost of acquiring the rights to the Blue Zones name and services, which are trademarked.
Leadership at LVHN, which helped get the ball rolling on a Blue Zones project in the Lehigh Valley, have said that efforts like this are key to better overall health outcomes in the community and in health care settings.
“We support initiatives aimed at making our communities healthier,” an LVHN spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Our ongoing partnership with Blue Zones is one example of how we improve lives in the communities we serve.”
Long-term plans
Blue Zones projects, of which close to 100 have been launched across the U.S., have resulted in marked improvements in many of the communities where they have occurred. These include things such as pedestrian infrastructure improvements, economic investment in downtown areas, additions of bike lanes and deals with local grocery stores to prioritize healthy foods. Statistical evidence appears to show decreases in obesity, smoking and stress, and increased consumption of healthy foods and overall well-being during the years Blue Zones projects were active.
In the Lehigh Valley, the project blueprint paints a picture of what is to come over the next several years. This includes holding community activities, working with community institutions and supporting specific policy initiatives.
The survey found that about 41% of residents in Allentown reported experiencing food insecurity.
Griffiths said they found an urgent need for access to healthy food, so near the top of the list is making it easier to purchase local, healthy, farm-fresh produce.
She said to accomplish this, the plan is to set up a food policy council and a request for proposal to get experts involved in making this happen.
Part of the blueprint is recruiting schools, restaurants, grocery stores and workplaces to participate in the Blue Zones project. Griffiths said the goal is that at least half of the schools in Allentown, seven restaurants, 10 grocery stores and a combination of worksites comprising 25% of Allentown’s workforce become Blue Zones project certified.
Griffiths said that for schools, this could entail prioritizing making healthier environments for teachers, faculty and students. This could include having an extra five- or 10-minute break in the day for teachers and staff, and offering healthy lunch options in and around the school for everyone.
“Same thing for kiddos — are there healthy, fresh produce offerings available with their school breakfast and lunch? Does the curriculum include education on healthy eating or the importance of natural movement, or are there opportunities for the school to come together with the community, together and celebrate and have that social connection?” Griffiths said.
Helping residents of Allentown make more thoughtful and healthier food choices is also a priority. The percentage of residents in Allentown who are obese or overweight was higher than the national average — nearly half of Hispanic and Latino residents self-identified as obese. For restaurants and grocery stores, fitting into the Blue Zones framework would include making those healthy choices easier.
“In restaurants, some of the things that are on that checklist that they could choose to implement or may already be doing, would be offering a vegetable or a side salad as the default side option for an entree, offering a plant-based entree item. Do they offer mocktails in addition to cocktails?” Griffiths said.
For grocery stores, an example of working within the Blue Zones framework would be having healthier checkout lanes — instead of putting candy bars and meat sticks at eye level, the store could put fruit or healthier options there.
“You may pick the healthier choice if it’s right there in front of you, and it’s easy to do the same if you think about the beverage container. What’s at the top of that at eye level? Is it water and nonsweetened beverages, or is it soda and energy drinks?” Griffiths said.
According to the blueprint document, part of gauging success for grocery stores would include getting certain items labeled as part of the Blue Zones so that their sales can be tracked.
Griffiths said there are also multiple policy goals that would include making it easier to walk and bike in Allentown. Another major policy goal would be eliminating exposure to secondhand smoke and preventing new tobacco use, as well as reducing excessive alcohol consumption and underage drinking. This is relevant because the survey found that a larger share of Allentown residents are smokers than the rest of the country.
Griffiths said that Blue Zones Project-Allentown will also continue to partner with the Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce and Allentown on different health and well-being programs and events since that kick-off.
“We will be aiming to engage 15% of the population, age 15 and older, in one of our Blue Zone-approved activities,” Griffiths said.
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