Dr. Jill Foster was a practicing family physician in Cincinnati when she became increasingly dismayed treating preventable illnesses. "A young female patient of mine who weighed 200 pounds asked me, 'Doctor, am I obese?' Foster recalls. "When I told her she was, the poor child was devastated." As both a vegetarian and doctor, Foster knew that unhealthy diets were the root cause of many of her patients' problems. So rather than slog upstream through the quickening torrent of diet-related disease, she took leave from her practice to study nutritional science in Birmingham, Alabama.

Had she been looking for the fastest route to the belly of the beast, Foster couldn't have chosen a better place. According to the Trust for America's Health, Alabama has the second-highest level of adult obesity (28.9 percent) in the nation. For African-Americans the numbers are worse: 38 percent are obese. And 286,000 Alabamians, or about 6 percent of the state's population, have been diagnosed with diabetes, a number that has climbed by more than 50 percent since 1994.

As a new resident of Birmingham, Dr. Foster, a petite black woman, soon noticed that most of the people around her were at least fifty pounds heavier than she was. "Poverty has a lot to do with obesity," she noted, "and so does race. When you're poor, you eat what's cheap and what's available." She also found that the only vegetables available in the city's poorer neighborhoods were fried okra and fried green tomatoes.

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