Healthcare doesn’t grow on trees — except perhaps in Louisville, where a $14.5 million research project is testing out that very theory on its residents.

The Green Heart project is an initiative lead by a number of institutions, including University of Louisville, The Nature Conservancy, and The Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil that aims to test the correlation between cardiovascular health and nature. The initiative was originally dreamt up by Aruni Bhatnagar, a medical professor at the University of Louisville, who firmly believes air pollution can lead to cardiovascular risks, and that trees could end up replacing lipid-lowering medications in the future.

The team behind this five-year collaboration hopes to prove definitively through data collection that living within a lush green landscape can improve one’s cardiovascular health.

“The project is essentially a controlled trial at neighborhood scale,” says Ted Smith, co-founder of The Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil. “We’re talking 20,000 residents across Louisville.” In this study, half the residents of numerous Louisville neighborhoods will begin living amongst 8,000 new bushes and native Kentucky trees — an aggressive greening plan that should eliminate air pollution.

Read the source article at Mashable