Activist, Nutritionist Sees Food as Key to Health and Prosperity

Alice Ammerman, Dr.P.H., R.D., was an activist in nutritional issues long before childhood obesity, diabetes or the sustainable local food movement were headline news. As a student of African studies and anthropology – and basketball player -- at Duke University in the 1970s, she was spurred to action by the boycott of Nestle. The company was marketing infant formula to African mothers who often were left to mix it with contaminated water and in a diluted state because they could not read the directions.

“It dawned on me that if I was going to do something useful in Africa and be speaking against these kinds of issues, I should probably know more about nutrition,” she said. “But I had carefully avoided chemistry and all those courses necessary to be a nutritionist,” she added with a laugh. So, she spent an additional year waiting tables and taking science prerequisites to enter a master’s degree program in public health.

Eventually, she earned her doctorate in public health, also at UNC-Chapel Hill – while commuting 70+ miles each way from Warrenton, N.C., where her husband, an internist, served in the U.S. Public Health Service. Today, Tom Keyserling, M.D., M.P.H., is a regular collaborator with an office next to hers at UNC’s Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, where she is director.

Ever the activist, Ammerman continues to work on behalf of underserved populations on issues of health disparities. She works with the Institute of Medicine on task forces and work groups at the state level. She also serves as chair of the subcommittee on Health, Wellness and Food Access for the state legislatively appointed Sustainable Local Food Advisory Council.

“In the last five to eight years, I have become increasingly involved with local food systems and how that can increase access to healthy food and also boost the economy,” she said. She is also very interested in “social entrepreneurship” and recalls with some humor how colleagues had accused of her of “selling out” when she first became associated with the term.

“Some of them assumed that all entrepreneurs are greedy capitalists,” she said. In fact, the movement is about using sustainable, creative solutions to health and economic problems, including encouraging entrepreneurship.

To that end, she leads the Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project through the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where she is a professor of nutrition. The project’s mission is to study the public health impact of moving toward a local, sustainable food system and whether it can address obesity, the environment and economic viability.

Her interest in working, advocating and studying these issues at the community level go hand in hand with her newest role as core leader for community engagement for the UNC Center for Diabetes Translation Research (CDTR), which works with the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute at UNC, one of 60 medical research institutions in the U.S. working to improve biomedical research through the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program.

In this role, she works to bring together her skills and experience in writing grants, conducting research and involving students with community members and groups to address obesity, food access and socioeconomic determinants of health related to diabetes in North Carolina. She also serves on the North Carolina American Indian Health Board, which fits with the CDTR’s mission to build research capacity and collaborate with UNC-Pembroke to address minority health concerns of Robeson County, including those of Lumbee Indians.

Over the years, Ammerman has practiced what she preaches as a nutritionist by baking wholesome yeast breads for her own family of now-grown children. As a result, she says they consider anything made out of white flour a “royal treat.” Where sunshine allows in her yard, she keeps a small garden. And, not ever daunted by a challenge – such as taking biochemistry and organic chemistry back-to-back one summer to prepare for graduate school -- she has also been known to balance a large watermelon on the back of her bicycle to bring it home from the farmer’s market.