When market traders want to lose weight: What are they doing and who are they listening to?
We depend on traders in our markets for much of the food that reaches our homes. We meet and bargain with them for our foodstuffs – plantain, cassava tomatoes, garden eggs, fish, fruits, grains and countless other foods. But how often do we stop to think about the health and nutrition practices of the people behind the stalls? I had an opportunity to do just that when I supervised an undergraduate research project involving 150 vendors in Dansoman, Accra. We were interested in their weight-management practices: how they perceived their own weight, whether they were trying to manage it, what they were actually doing and where they obtained information from.