NEW YORK, NY December 18, 2007 —Hoping to combat rising obesity and diabetes rates, city leaders want to encourage more fruit and vegetable street vendors in low-income neighborhoods. The city plans to issue 15-hundred new permits for produce vendors for Harlem, Jamaica, Bed-Stuy, and south Bronx.

REPORTER; Ulysses Kilgore, president of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Health Care Center, says community leaders now must convince people to eat fresh fruits and veggies.

KILGORE: These messages should be delivered from the church pulpits, bounce off the walls in beauty parlors, barber shops, presented on basketball courts and in schools, and around the dinner table and wherever else people might congregate.

REPORTER: Mayor Bloomberg says research shows that people eat more fresh fruit and vegetables when they have more produce markets in their neighborhoods.